She puckered her penciled eyebrows and studied her program.  “The third after the two next?”

She bowed gravely, and I said, “Thank you.”  I felt very young and inexperienced as I returned the bow.

“That’s all right,” she said.  “Where shall I find you?  It doesn’t matter, I shall know you again”; and she had the audacity to write on her program, for I saw her do it, “white dress, red hair.”

She was borne off by a triumphant boy, who looked at me as much as to say, “You’re jolly well sold if you think you are going to nab this dance.”

I asked a hungry-looking boy with many freckles who she was.  “Oh! that’s Dolly,” he said; “she is a flyer, isn’t she?”

“Dolly who?” I asked.

“Oh! just Dolly; that does.”  He looked away, looked back, hesitated, and swallowed.  I, feeling that he perhaps needed the assistance a man sometimes requires of a woman, encouragement, smiled at him.

“You wouldn’t dance this, I suppose?” he said.

“Certainly,” I answered.

We danced.  He was a nice boy, very much in earnest, very much afraid of tiring me, very much afraid of letting me go, too shy to stop, until I suggested it, for which act of consideration he seemed grateful.

He told me he had five brothers, all older than himself; that he never had new trousers, always the other boys’ cut down; that he liked school; wanted a bicycle more than anything in the world —­ of his very own, of course; wanted a pony of his very own; wanted a dog of his very own.  He hadn’t anything of his very own.

I said I supposed he thought his eldest brother very lucky.

“Because of the trousers?” he asked.

I said, “Well, yes, I suppose he has the new ones.”

“Well,” he said, “you see he doesn’t.  That’s the chowse of the whole thing.  He is the eldest, but you see Dick’s the biggest, so he gets the new trousers.  It is hard, isn’t it?”

I said it was indeed.

“The best of it is,” he said, “I am catching jackup.  He is in an awful wax.  I shouldn’t be surprised if I were bigger than him next holidays.  Do you like dancing?  I simply loathe it —­ not with you, I don’t mean I.”

He told me many other confidences, and I was really sorry when he remembered, with an evident pang, that he had to dance with that “rum little kid over there.”

I was quite certain that he would never break a promise.  I could picture him going through life always keeping promises, rashly made, no doubt.  I wondered what he would talk to girls about at dances years hence —­ trousers?  Hardly.  By that time he would have trousers of his very own, and they would cease, in consequence, to be things of interest.

He would be a soldier —­ of that I could have no doubt.  He was the kind of boy England wants and can still get, thank God! say pessimists what they will.

While I was awaiting my Dolly dance, I came upon a small, disconsolate boy.