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Mr. Pratt, that new drug clerk at Ransom's, jest said, 'Glad to meet you, Miss Sandage,' an' next minute put his arms aroun' me and his cheek against mine an' went to dancin'. I kinder gasped inside myse'f, but I'm used to it now. I hope he asks me again to-night; he's a wonderful dancer."

"I imagine the wickedness you folks carry on ain't up to much," disparaged Abner, implying a wide criminal experience of his own.

"Well . . . no . . . I guess not," admitted Beatrice, a little abashed, recalling the lurid tales which accompanied Abner from Irontown.

But later that evening in the ballroom of the Jones residence, Abner forgot the vaunt of his hard heart. The dancers actually on the floor, swirling and jiggling to the blare and clash of the jazz band from Columbia, filled him with a feeling of impropriety. From the first dance he had realized that his own efforts would be clumsy, and a painful self-consciousness kept him prisoner on a settee. This settee was behind two artificial palms which Adelaide had borrowed from the Ransom drug store through the good will of this same Mr. Pratt who had danced with Beatrice Belle. The palms formed a little retreat behind which Abner was gratefully concealed. Girls and men circled past his eyes in a never-ending stream. In the opposite corner the jazz band neighed away in feverish syncopation. The leader, a yellow Negro, had a mephistophelian cast of countenance which he kept moulded in a satanic grin. This grin was as mechanical and as much a stage property as the saxaphonist's waving of his instrument up and down, but Abner did not know this: it looked wicked to him.

After the fashion of non-dancing men at a ball the youth gradually grew more and more melancholy and despondent. Whether he would or not quotations from the travelling evangelists concerning dancing floated through his head . . . devil's trap . . . road to hell . . . palace of shame. . . . And behind this was the hill-born in-