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stinct in Abner to associate wickedness with everything pleasant, graceful, or beautiful. It seemed to him that he was committing a subtle sin merely to sit and look at the dancers, although he disapproved. He thought if he should happen to drop dead in this ballroom—a fatality which, according to the evangelists, often occurred—he would very certainly go to hell. He felt far more wicked now than when he hurried after the mob in Irontown to help lynch Peck Bradley. And he knew this to be a true moral judgment because his conscience was whispering it to him; that still small voice in his heart, which according to the hill belief is the actual voice of God, and is therefore infallible.

Out of this generalized disapproval of the dance Abner's attention was drawn to certain particular objections. Beatrice Belle and her Mr. Pratt were the greatest of these. Abner could see Mr. Pratt's sleek black head dipping among the dancers as he pressed a perfectly strange jowl to Beatrice's cheek. As they dipped past the palms, Abner noticed a misty, unseeing expression in their eyes, a set seraphic smile on Beatrice Belle's lips, while Mr. Pratt's face wore the strained look of one clinging to the fringe of paradise.

Abner regarded this bliss with suspicion, suspecting some connection between it and the sex of the dancers; and, reverting to the evangelists, to possess sex at all was wicked, much less to enjoy it.

"I'm goin' to speak to Miss Haly about this," he thought, "the way B'atrice Belle's carryin' on."

He watched Pratt with the disgust a boy feels when he sees another boy kissing his sister.

"It wouldn't take much for me to tell that damn little drug clerk where he heads in—and a perfect stranger to her . . ."

In the midst of this brotherly mood another pair of dancers floated past the palms and a sharp constriction went through Abner's chest. He caught his breath, staring after Adelaide Jones and Buckingham Sharp. Both danced well; they were the most graceful dancers on the floor.