Even through the radiant happiness that surrounded him like a mist, he caught the bitterness under her raillery.  It puzzled him.

“It’s a young lady I knew at camp.  I was in an army camp, you know.”

“Is her name a secret?”

“Why, no.  It is Cardew.  Miss Lily Cardew.”

“I believe you—­not.”

“But it is,” he said, genuinely concerned.  “Why in the world should I give you a wrong name?”

Her eyes were fixed on his face.

“No.  You wouldn’t.  But it makes me laugh, because—­well, it was crazy, anyhow.”

“What was crazy?”

“Something I had in my mind.  Just forget it.  I’ll tell you what will happen, Mr. Cameron.  You’ll stay here about six weeks.  Then you’ll get a job at the Cardew Mills.  They use chemists there, and you will be—­”

She lifted her finger-tips and blew along them delicately.

“Gone—­like that,” she finished.

Sometimes Willy Cameron wondered about Miss Boyd.  The large young man, for instance, whose name he had learned was Louis Akers, did not come any more.  Not since that telephone conversation.  But he had been distinctly a grade above that competent young person, Edith Boyd, if there were such grades these days; fluent and prosperous-looking, and probably able to offer a girl a good home.  But she had thrown him over.  He had heard her doing it, and when he had once ventured to ask her about Akers she had cut him off curtly.

“I was sick to death of him.  That’s all,” she had said.

But on the night of Lily’s invitation he was to hear more of Louis Akers.

It was his evening in the shop.  One day he came on at seven-thirty in the morning and was off at six, and the next he came at ten and stayed until eleven at night.  The evening business was oddly increasing.  Men wandered in, bought a tube of shaving cream or a tooth-brush, and sat or stood around for an hour or so; clerks whose families had gone to the movies, bachelors who found their lodging houses dreary, a young doctor or two, coming in after evening office hours to leave a prescription, and remaining to talk and listen.  Thus they satisfied their gregarious instinct while within easy call of home.

The wealthy had their clubs.  The workmen of the city had their balls and sometimes their saloons.  But in between was that vast, unorganized male element which was neither, and had neither.  To them the neighborhood pharmacy, open in the evening, warm and bright, gave them a rendezvous.  They gathered there in thousands, the country over.  During the war they fought their daily battles there, with newspaper maps.  After the war the League of Nations, local politics, a bit of neighborhood scandal, washed down with soft drinks from the soda fountain, furnished the evening’s entertainment.