"Never mind," he said. "I'll go myself. Road's too rotten to take the machine in." Then he hesitated, "I say, will you hold these confounded birds 'til I come back? Won't be gone a minute. Just want to speak to the governor."

Nance scrambled down the bank and accepted the fluttering charges, then watched with liveliest interest the buoyant figure in the light suit go swinging up the road. There was something tantalizingly familiar in his quick, imperious manner and his brown, irresponsible eyes. In her first confusion of mind she thought he must be the prince come to life out of Mr. Demry's old fairy tale. Then she caught her breath.

"I believe it's that Clarke boy!" she thought, with rising excitement, "I wonder if he'd remember the fight? I wonder if he'd remember me?"

She went over to the automobile and ran her fingers over the silver initials on the door.

"M.D.C," she repeated. "It _is_ him! It is!"

In the excitement of her discovery she relaxed her grasp on the pigeons, and one of them escaped. In vain she whistled and coaxed; it hopped about in the tree overhead and then soared away to larger freedom.

Nance was aghast at the catastrophe. She did not wait for the owner's return, but rushed headlong down the road to meet him.

"I let one of 'em go!" she cried in consternation, as he vaulted the fence and came toward her. "I wouldn't 'a' done it for anything in the world. But I'll pay you for it, a little each week. Honest I will!"

The handsome boyish face above her clouded instantly.

"You let it go?" he repeated furiously. "You little fool you! How did you do it?"

Nance looked at him for a moment; then she deliberately lifted the other pigeon as high as she could reach and opened her hand.

"Like that!" she cried.

Mac Clarke watched his second bird wheel into s.p.a.ce; then his amazed glance dropped to the slim figure of the young girl in her short gingham dress, with the sunlight shining on her hair and on her bright, defiant eyes.

"You've got your nerve!" he said with a short laugh; then he climbed into his car and, with several backward glances of mingled anger and amus.e.m.e.nt, drove away.

Nance related the incident with great gusto to Dan that night on the way home.

"He never recognized me, but I knew him right off. Same old Smart Aleck, calling people names."

"I was up in the office when he come in," said Dan. "He'd been held up for speeding and wanted his father to pay his fine."'

"Did he do it?"

"Of course. Mac always gets what he wants. He told Bean he wasn't going to stay at that school in Virginia if he had to make 'em expel him. Sure enough they did. Wouldn't I like to have his chance though!"

"I don't blame him for not wanting to go to school," said Nance. Then she added absently, "Say, he's got to be a awful swell-looker, hasn't he?"

That night, for the first time, she objected to stopping in Post-Office Square.

"It ain't any fun to hang around there," she said impatiently. "I'm sick of doing tame things all the time."

The next time Nance saw Mac Clarke was toward the close of the summer.

Through the long sweltering hours of an interminable August morning she had filed and chipped bottles with an accuracy and speed that no longer gave cause for criticism. The months of confinement were beginning to tell upon her; her bright color was gone, and she no longer had the energy at the noon hour to go down the road to the elm-tree. She wanted above all things to stretch out at full length and rest her back and relax all those tense muscles that were so reluctantly learning to hold one position for hours at a time.

At the noon hour she had the unexpected diversion of a visit from Birdie Smelts. Birdie had achieved her cherished ambition of going on the stage, and was now a chorus girl in the "Rag Time Follies." Meager news of her had reached the alley from time to time, but n.o.body was prepared for the very pretty and sophisticated young person who condescended to accept board and lodging from her humble parents during the interval between her engagements. Nance was genuinely glad to see her and especially gratified by the impression her white coat-suit and black picture hat made on the finishing room.

"It must be grand to be on the stage," said Gert enviously.

"Well, it's living," said Birdie, airily. "That's more than you can claim for this rotten grind."

She put a high-heeled, white-shod foot on the window ledge to adjust its bow, and every eye in the room followed the process.

"I bet I make more money in a week," she continued dramatically, "than you all make in a month. And look at your hands! Why, they couldn't pay me enough to have my hands scarred up like that!"

"It ain't my hands that's worryin' me," said another girl. "It's my feet.

Say, the destruction on your shoes is somethin' fierce! You orter see this here room some nights at closin' time; it's that thick with gla.s.s you don't know where to step."

"I'd know," said Birdie. "I'd step down and out, and don't you forget it."

Nance had been following the conversation in troubled silence.

"I don't mind the work so awful much," she said restlessly. "What gets me is never having any fun. I haven't danced a step since I left Forest Home, Birdie."

"You'd get your fill of it if you was with me," Birdie said importantly.

"Seven nights a week and two matinees."

"'Twouldn't be any too much for me," said Nance. "I could dance in my sleep."

Birdie was sitting in the window now, ostensibly examining her full red lips in a pocket-mirror, but in reality watching the factory yard below.

"There goes your whistle!" she said, getting up suddenly. "Say, Nance, can't you scare up an excuse to hook off this afternoon? I'll take you to a show if you will!"

Nance's pulses leapt at the thought, but she shook her head and went reluctantly back to her bench. For the next ten minutes her fingers lagged at their task, and she grew more and more discontented. All the youth in her clamored suddenly for freedom. She was tired of being the slave of a whistle, a cog in a machine. With a sudden rash impulse she threw down her tools and, slipping her hat from its peg, went in swift pursuit of Birdie.

At the foot of the narrow stairs she came to a sudden halt. Outside the door, in the niche made by the gas-pipe and the adjoining wall, stood Mac Clarke and Birdie. He had his arms about her, and there was a look in his face that Nance had never seen in a man's face before. Of course it was meant for the insolent eyes under the picture hat, but instead it fell on Nance standing in the doorway. For a full minute his ardent gaze held her captive; then he dropped his arms in sudden embarra.s.sment, and she melted out of the doorway and fled noiselessly up the stairway.

On the upper landing she suffered a head-on collision with the foreman, who demanded in no gentle tones what in the devil she was doing out there with her hat on at that hour.

"None of your business," said Nance, recklessly.

Bean looked at her flashing eyes and flushed face, and laughed. She was the youngest girl in the factory and the only one who was not afraid of him.

"See here," he said, "I am going to kiss you or fire you. Which'll you have?"

Nance dodged his outstretched hand and reached the top step.

"You won't do neither!" she cried fiercely. "You can't fire me, because I fired myself ten minutes ago, and I wouldn't kiss you to stay in heaven, let alone a d.a.m.ned old bottle factory!"

It was the Nance of the slums who spoke--the Nance whose small bare fists had fought the world too long for the knuckles to be tender. She had drifted a long way from the carefully acquired refinements of Forest Home, but its influence, like a dragging anchor, still sought to hold her against the oncoming gales of life.

CHAPTER XIV

IDLENESS