“You better use any influence you’ve got with your brother,” he said to Eugene, “to make him come to time.  I can’t do anything with him.  If he gets in trouble, he needn’t come to me!  I’ll never help him again.  I’m tired of it!”

Eugene glanced twinklingly at the outcast.  “I didn’t know he was such a roarer as all that!” he said, lightly, not taking Joe as of enough consequence to be treated as a sinner.

This encouraged Mrs. Louden to pathos upon the subject of her shame before other women when Joe happened to be mentioned, and the supper was finished with the topic.  Joe slipped away through the kitchen, sneakingly, and climbed the back fence.  In the alley he lit a cheap cigarette, and thrusting his hands into his pockets and shivering violently—­for he had no overcoat,—­walked away singing to himself, “A Spanish cavalier stood in his retreat,” his teeth affording an appropriate though involuntary castanet accompaniment.

His movements throughout the earlier part of that evening are of uncertain report.  It is known that he made a partial payment of forty-five cents at a second-hand book-store for a number of volumes—­ Grindstaff on Torts and some others—­which he had negotiated on the instalment system; it is also believed that he won twenty-eight cents playing seven-up in the little room behind Louie Farbach’s bar; but these things are of little import compared to the established fact that at eleven o’clock he was one of the ball guests at the Pike Mansion.  He took no active part in the festivities, nor was he one of the dancers:  his was, on the contrary, the role of a quiet observer.  He lay stretched at full length upon the floor of the enclosed porch (one of the strips of canvas was later found to have been loosened), wedged between the outer railing and a row of palms in green tubs.  The position he occupied was somewhat too draughty to have been recommended by a physician, but he commanded, between the leaves of the screening palms, an excellent view of the room nearest the porch.  A long window, open, afforded communication between this room, one of those used for dancing, and the dim bower which had been made of the veranda, whither flirtatious couples made their way between the dances.

It was not to play eavesdropper upon any of these that the uninvited Joe had come.  He was not there to listen, and it is possible that, had the curtains of other windows afforded him the chance to behold the dance, he might not have risked the dangers of his present position.  He had not the slightest interest in the whispered coquetries that he heard; he watched only to catch now and then, over the shoulders of the dancers, a fitful glimpse of a pretty head that flitted across the window—­ the amber hair of Mamie Pike.  He shivered in the draughts; and the floor of the porch was cement, painful to elbow and knee, the space where he lay cramped and narrow; but the golden bubbles of her