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A few moments later the leaves of the artificial palms were pressed aside and Beatrice Belle and her Mr. Pratt stepped into the embrasure hunting a seat. Pratt murmured a "Pardon" and was about to take his partner elsewhere when Beatrice Belle saw who occupied the covert. She straightened indignantly.

"Abner Teeftaller, why wasn't you dancin'?"

"You know I kain't dance good enough for this place!" growled Abner.

"Why, he can, too!" cried Beatrice. "He dances very well, Sim."

"You must try, Mr. Teeftallow," encouraged Mr. Pratt earnestly. "It isn't hard when you get the hang of the thing."

"I didn't want to ball up the dance," said Abner, with his dislike of Mr. Pratt considerably diminished by this bit of sympathy.

"Oh, you won't," smiled the drug clerk. "We're used to collisions."

They were so kindly and considerate toward him that Abner's world brightened measurably. He decided that perhaps Sharp had not proposed and been accepted after all. It was possible Adelaide had nodded to some other suggestion.

"Adelaide thought you had gone home," reproved Beatrice Belle. "She was all cut up about it. I'll tell her you are here."

"No, don't!" cried Abner, with an irrational terror at being found.

"Why, the idea, you're not a hermit or anything . . ."

At that moment the roar and rattle of the jazz burst out anew. Mr. Pratt received Beatrice Belle in his arms, adjusted his blue-shaved cheek to her own, and wobbled rapturously out of the palms and away.

Abner, watching them, decided that Pratt was not an emissary of Satan as he had at first suspected, but that he was merely a sissy; one of those watered youths who go about