"Education?" demanded Winona, incredulous. "But he's left school!"

"He'll get it out of school. Only kind ever I got. He's educating himself every day. Never mind his clothes. Right clothes are only right when they fit your job. Give the boy a chance to find himself. He's still young, Buck is--still in the gristle."

Winona winced at "gristle." It seemed so physiological--almost coa.r.s.e.

A year went by in which Wilbur was perforce left to his self-education, working for Porter Howgill or at the garage or for Sam Pickering as he listed. "I'm making good money," was his steady rejoinder to Winona's hectoring.

"As if money were everything," wrote Winona in her journal, where she put the case against him.

Then when she had ceased to hope better things for him Wilbur Cowan seemed to waken. There were signs and symptoms Winona thus construed. He became careful in his attire, bought splendid new garments. His lean, bold jaw was almost daily smoothed by the razor of Don Paley, and Winona discovered a flask of perfume on his bureau in the little house. The label was Heart of Flowers. It was perhaps a more florid essence than Winona would have chosen, having a downright vigour of a.s.sertion that left one in no doubt of its presence; but it was infinitely superior to the scent of machine oil or printer's ink which had far too often betrayed the boy's vicinity.

Now, too, he wore his young years with a new seriousness; was more restrained of speech, with intervals of apparently lofty meditation.

Winona rejoiced at these evidences of an awakening soul. The boy might after all some day become one of the better sort. She felt sure of this when he sought her of his own free will and awkwardly invited her to beautify his nails. He who had aforetime submitted to the ordeal under protest; who had sworn she should never again so torture him! Surely he was striving at last to be someone people would care to meet.

Poor Winona did not dream that a great love had come into Wilbur Cowan's life; a deep and abiding love that bathed all his world in colourful radiance and moved him to those surface elegances for which all her own pleading had been in vain. Not even when he asked her one night--while she worked with buffer and orange-wood stick--if she believed in love at first sight did she suspect the underlying dynamics, the true inebriating factor of this reform. He put the query with elaborate and deceiving casualness, having cleared a road to it with remarks upon a circ.u.mspect historical romance that Winona had read to him; and she had merely said that she supposed it often did happen that way, though it were far better that true love come gently into one's life, based upon a profound mutual respect and esteem which would endure through long years of wedded life.

Wilbur had questioned this, but so cautiously and quite impersonally that Winona could not suspect his interest in the theme to be more than academic. She believed she had convinced him that love at first sight, so-called, is not the love one reads about in the better sort of literature. She was not alarmed--not even curious. In her very presence the boy had trifled with his great secret and she had not known!

So continuously had Winona dwelt in the loftier realms of social and spiritual endeavour, it is doubtful if she knew that an organization known as the Friday Night Social Club was doing a lot to make life brighter for those of Newbern's citizens who were young and sportive and yet not precisely people of the better sort. In the older days of the town, when Winona was twenty, there was but one social set. Now she was thirty, and there were two sets. She knew the town had grown; one nowadays saw strange people that one did not know, even many one would not care to know. If she had been told that the Friday Night Social Club met weekly in Knights of Pythias Hall to dance those sinister new dances that the city papers were so outspoken about she would have considered it an affair of the underworld, about which the less said the letter.

Had it been disclosed to her that Wilbur Cowan, under the chaperonage of Edward--Spike--Brennon, 133 lbs., ringside, had become an addict of these affairs, a determined and efficient exponent of the weird new steps--"a good thing for y'r footwork," Spike had said--she would have considered he had plumbed the profoundest depths of social ignominy. Yet so it was. Each Friday night he danced. He liked it, and while he disported himself from the lightest of social motives love came to him; the world was suddenly a place of fixed rainbows, and dancing--with her--no longer a gladsome capering, but a holy rite.

On a certain Friday evening unstarred by any portent she had burst upon his yielding eyes. Instantly he could have told Winona more than she would ever know about love at first sight. A creature of rounded beauty, peerlessly blonde, her ma.s.s of hair elaborately coifed and bound about her pale brow with a fillet of sable velvet. He saw her first in the dance, sumptuously gowned, regal, yet blithe, yielding as might a G.o.ddess to the mortal embrace of Bill Bardin as they fox-trotted to the viol's surge. He was stricken dumb until the dance ended. Then he gripped an arm of Spike Brennon, who had stood by him against the wall, "looking 'em over," as Spike had put it.

"Look!" he urged in tones hushed to the wonder of her. Spike had looked.

"Gee!" breathed the stricken one mechanically. He would not have chosen the word, but it formed a vent for his emotion.

"Bleached blonde," said Spike after a sharper scrutiny of the fair one, who now coquetted with a circle of gallants.

"Isn't she?" exclaimed the new lover, admiringly.

With so golden a result to dazzle him, was he to quarrel pettishly with the way it had been wrought?

"Do you suppose I could be introduced to her?" demanded Wilbur, timidly.

This marked the depth of his pa.s.sion. He was too good a dancer to talk such nonsense ordinarily.

"Surest thing you know," said Spike. "Could you be introduced to her?

In a split second! Come on!"

"But you don't know her yourself?" Wilbur hung back.

"Stop your kiddin'!"

Spike half dragged his fearful charge across the floor, not too subtly shouldered a way between Bill Bardin and Terry Stamper, bowed gracefully to the strange beauty, and said, "h.e.l.lo, sister! Shake hands with my friend, Kid Cowan."

"Pleased to meet you!" She smiled graciously upon Wilbur and extended a richly jewelled hand, which he timidly pressed. Then she turned to Spike Brennon. "I know your name, all right," she declared. "You're that Mister Fresh we hear so much about--giving introductions to parties you ain't met yourself."

Wilbur Cowan blushed for Spike's _faux pas_, looking to see him slink off abashed, but there were things he had yet to learn about his friend.

"Just for that," said Spike, "I'll take this dance with you." And brazenly he encircled her waist as the music came anew.

"It's hot to-night," said Wilbur very simply to Terry Stamper and Bill Bardin as they moved off the floor to an open window.

His dancing eyes followed Beauty in the dance, and he was at her side when the music ceased. Until it came again he fanned by an open window her flushed and lovely face. Her name was Pearl.

"I wish this night would last forever," he murmured to her.

"Tut, tut!" said Pearl in humorous dismay, "and me having to be at business at seven A.M.!"

Only then did he learn that she was not a mere social b.u.t.terfly, but one of the proletariat; that, in truth, she waited on table at the Mansion.

Instantly he constructed their future together. He would free her from that life of toil.

"You're too beautiful for work like that," he told her.

Pearl eyed him with sudden approval.

"You're all right, kid. I often said the same thing myself, but no one's fell for it up to date."

They danced, and again they danced.

"You're the nicest boy in the bunch," murmured Pearl.

"I never saw any one so beautiful," said Wilbur.

Pearl smiled graciously. "I love the sound of your voice," she said.

She was wrested from him by Bill Bardin. When he would have retrieved her Terry Stamper had secured her notice. So through another dance he stood aloof against the wall, moody now. It might be only social finesse in Pearl but she was showing to others the same pleased vivacity she had shown to him. Could it be she did not yet understand? Had she possibly not divined that they two were now forever apart from the trivial world?

They danced again.

"Don't you feel as if we'd always known each other?" he demanded.

"Sure, kid!" breathed Pearl.

It was after still another dance--she had meantime floated in the arms of a mere mill foreman. This time he led her into the dusky hallway, where open windows brought the cool night to other low-voiced couples.

He led her to the farthest window, where the shadow was deepest, and they looked out-above the roof of Rapp Brothers, Jewellery-to a sky of pale stars and a blond moon.

"Ain't it great?" said Pearl.

He stood close to her, trembling from the faintest contact with her loveliness. He wished to kiss her-he must kiss her. But he was afraid.

Pearl was sympathetic. She divined his trouble, and in the deep shadow she adroitly did it herself. Then she rebuked his boldness.

"Say, but you're the quick little worker, seems to me!"

For a moment he was incapable of speech, standing mute, her warm hand in his.

"It's been a dream," he managed at last. "Just like a dream! Now you belong to me, don't you?"