Chapter 12

to John Consadine, and they were all three laughing. I can't think how it is that girls of that sort manage to stir things up so and get all the men around them."

"Neither can I," said Mrs. Hexter wickedly. "If I did know how, I believe I'd do it sometimes myself. What is it you want of me, Miss Sessions? I must run back and see to supper, if you don't need me."

"But I do," fretted Lydia. "I want your help. This waltzing and--and such things--ought to be stopped."

"All right," rejoined practical Mrs. Hexter. "The quickest way to do it is to stop the music."

She had meant the speech as a jeer, but literal-minded Lydia Sessions welcomed its suggestion. Hurrying down the long room, she spoke to the leader of their small orchestra. The Negro raised to her a brown face full of astonishment. His fiddle-bow faltered--stopped. He turned to his two fellows and gave hasty directions. The waltz measure died away, and a quadrille was announced.

"That was too bad," said Stoddard as they came to a halt; "you were just getting the step beautifully."

The girl flashed a swift, sweet look up at him. "I do love to dance," she breathed.

"John, would you be so kind as to come and help in the supper room," Miss Sessions's hasty tones broke in.

She was leaning on Charlie Conroy's arm, and when she departed to hide Johnnie safely away in the depths of their impromptu kitchen, it left the two men alone together. Conroy promptly fastened upon the other.

Charlie Conroy was a young man who had made up his mind to get on socially. Such figures are rarer in America than in the old world. Yet Charlie Conroy with his petty ambitions does not stand entirely alone. He seriously regarded marriage as a stepping-stone to a circle which should include "the best people." That this term did not indicate the noblest or most selfless, need hardly be explained. It meant only that bit of froth which in each community rides high on the top of the cup, and which, in Watauga, was augmented by the mill owners of its suburb of Cottonville. Conroy had been grateful for the opportunity to make an entry into this circle by means of assisting Miss Sessions in her charitable work. That lady herself, as sister-in-law of Jerome Hardwick and a descendant of an excellent New England family, he regarded with absolute veneration, quite too serious and profound for anything so assured as mere admiration.

"I tried to warn you," he began: "but you were bound to get stung."

"I beg your pardon?" returned Stoddard in that civil, colourless interrogation which should always check over-familiar speech, even from the dullest. But Conroy was not sensitive.

"That big red-headed girl, you know," he said, leaning close and speaking in a confidential tone. "I mistook her for a lady. I was going my full length--telling her what fun the mill girls were, and trying to do the agreeable--when I found out."

"Found out what?" inquired Stoddard. "That she was not a lady?"

"Aw, come off," laughed Conroy. "You make a joke of everything."

"I knew that she was a weaver in the mill," said Stoddard quietly.

Conroy glanced half wistfully over his shoulder in the direction where Johnnie had vanished.

"She's a good-looker all right," he said thoughtfully. "And smile--when that girl smiles and turns those eyes on you--by George! if she was taken to New York and put through one of those finishing schools she'd make a sensation in the swagger set."

Stoddard nodded gravely. He had not Conroy's faith in the fashionable finishing school; but what he lacked there, he made up in conviction as to Johnnie's deserts and abilities.

"There she comes now," said Conroy, as the door swung open to admit a couple of girls with trays of coffee cups. "She walks mighty well. I wonder where a girl like that learned to carry herself so finely. By George, she _is_ a good-looker! She's got 'em all beaten; if she was only--. Queer about the accidents of birth, isn't it? Now, what would you say, in her heredity, makes a common girl like that step and look like a queen?"

Gray Stoddard's face relaxed. A hint of his quizzical, inscrutable smile was upon it as he answered.

"Nature doesn't make mistakes. I don't call Johnnie Consadine a common girl--it strikes me that she is rather uncommon."

And outside, a young fellow in the Sunday suit of a workingman was walking up and down, staring at the lighted windows, catching a glimpse now and again of one girl or another, and cursing under his breath when he saw Johnnie Consadine.

"Wouldn't go with me to the dance at Watauga--oh no! But she ain't too tired to dance with the swells!" he muttered to the darkness. "And I can't get a word nor a look out of her. Lord, I don't know what some women think!"