CHAPTER XXXI Shirt Studs as Cupid's Messenger AFTER the room had returned to place Skippy rallied, took the introductions with preternatural stiffness, and gravitated to Snorky. The white shirt front in the most unaccountable manner had swollen to alarming dimensions, the coat tails must be dragging on the floor. His collar cut under his imprisoned neck and his large white hands, longing for sheltering pockets, seemed to float before him like inflated balloons. If his were complete manhood,--oh for a soft shirt and a turned down collar!

"Kill it," said Snorky under his breath.

"What's wrong?"

"Kill that flag of liberty, you chump!" said Snorky, glowering at the flaming edge of the silk bandana handkerchief which Skippy was sporting at his breast pocket.

"What's wrong with that? Every one does it."

"Wrong! Look around you."

Skippy did so and surreptitiously extinguished the bandana.

"Holy Mike, we're in for it," said Snorky. "Do you know who they are?"

"The girls?"

"Daughters of the Presbyterian minister, strict as nails—Sunday school and mission stuff. Oh Lord!"

"Pretend you knew it all along."

"And that other stuff? The dead game sporting life?"

"Stick to your guns!" said Skippy desperately.

The next moment he was at table, between Miss Caroline Bedelle and the blonde Margarita, while across the table the soft velvety eyes of Jennie looked at him sadly and reproachfully.

"Good gracious, Jack," said Snorky's sister, staring at him. "I never, never would have known you. You've gained twenty pounds."

"It's the shirt," thought Skippy, glancing down at the bulging front that gave him the torso of a wrestler. Then he began to wonder which was the owner of the still slightly moist tie. But soon all discomforts, even the intricate maze of forks and knives, were forgotten before the alarming problem of the shirt front. When he sat upright, stiff as a ramrod, it was relatively quiescent, but the moment he relaxed or bent forward to eat it bulged forth as though working on a spring, until a lurking horror that it would escape altogether began to possess him. He crept forward on his chair and balanced on the edge, trying to mitigate the conspicuous rigidity of his pose by a nonchalant coquetting with the salt cellar.

"I suppose I must talk to you, for appearances' sake," said the blonde Miss Tupper.

"Why so?" said Skippy haughtily, for having just reacted from blondes, blondes did not appeal to him.

"You ask?"

"Certainly I ask, and I think an apology is due my friend and myself," said Skippy from his great fund of literary conversations.

"Well, I like that!"

"You cut us dead twice on the deck and then pretended not to know Arthur when he started to speak to you," said Skippy icily.

Miss Margarita Tupper looked at him with the intuitive suspicion of the righteous.

"I don't believe a word of it," she said.

"That is adding insult to injury," said Skippy, still in the best fictional manner. "Pardon me if I do not pursue this conversation any longer."

"I guess that'll hold the old girl," he said, chuckling inwardly. But alas for such vanities, or was it the unseen moral guardians which may be expected to watch over the daughters of the upright! The sudden shift of his indignant body was attended with fatal results.

There was a distinct "pop." The upper patent shirt-stud shot out, tinkled against a vase and rolled directly towards the girl with the velvety eyes.

"What's that?" said Caroline, startled.

"Some one threw a pebble against the window pane," said a voice.

"Something cracked."

They are wrong, eternally wrong, who look upon youth as a period of careless joy on the threshold of manhood's struggles and sorrows! Never in after-life would Skippy Bedelle experience such a blank, helpless horror as in that awful moment, when he sat overcome with shame and confusion, awaiting detection. What in heaven's name was he to say when the eyes of the whole company would inevitably be directed to the telltale stud, blazing now at the plate of Miss Tupper? What did any one say, anyhow, when a shirt stud popped across the table? Nothing in his experience or the experience of all the novelists in the world could supply a clue. Wave after wave of red and redder confusion rippled up from his collar and surged to the roots of his hair. Should he brazen it out? Should he make a light answer, or was it etiquette to apologize humbly to his hostess? How could he tell? If he were discovered there was only one thing to do, to run for it, to retreat to his room, lock his door, escape by the window and leave by the night train, disgraced and branded forever!

"Very funny," said Mrs. Bedelle. "Caroline, look at the Bohemian glass vase. I'm sure I heard it crack."

All glances immediately concentrated on the fatal area. Detection was now but a question of instants. Then Skippy in the throes of despair saw the plump little hand of Miss Jennie Tupper reach out and casually close over the offending pearl stud. He was saved, saved by the miracle of compassion and forgiveness that lifts women to those sublime heights where mere men cannot attain!

Tears threatened his eyes, his throat swelled up and slowly subsided. He looked over into the velvety eyes and sent a message of abject gratitude. He was her slave from now on, irrevocably bound, faithful until death!

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"You didn't detherve it," said Miss Jennie an hour later when in the seclusion of the veranda she had restored to him the unspeakable stud.

"You're an angel," said Skippy hoarsely. "I'll never, never forget that. That was white of you, awfully white!"

"You didn't detherve it," repeated Miss Tupper with as much severity as can accompany the slightest of lisps and the eyes of a gazelle.

"Don't be hard on a fellow," said Skippy miserably.

"It was outwageous. You know, you didn't know us."

How was he to lie to his saviour and benefactor and yet how betray a chum?

"It did look bad," he said, momentarily at loss, "but honest, now, Snorky's intentions were nothing but honorable. Honest they were."

"I with I could believe it," said Miss Jennie sadly.

"I say, you must think I'm an awful rum sort," said Skippy, on whom the velvety eyes against the distant moon ripple on the water and the nearby night fragrance of the honeysuckle was beginning to work its charm. "Well, I suppose I am—"

"Oh no."

"A rotten good-for-nothing lot," said Skippy gloomily, falling easily into the new part and surprised to find what peculiar pleasure could be extracted from the rÔle of the wayward.

"No, no, you're not that bad," said Miss Jennie earnestly, "but I do think—well you've not been under the withest of influenthes, have you?"

"I haven't had a chance," said Skippy desperately. "Everything has been against me. Guess no one cares what becomes of me."

"I know," said the gentle voice. "It ith hard."

"Look here, Miss Tupper," said Skippy, beginning to be convinced of his own predestination for the gallows, as he instinctively felt the sentimental value of the rÔle. "Men like myself don't get a chance to know women like you. I wish to heaven—" He stopped, a lump in his throat, and gazed into the sentimental night. Great heavens, what a depraved character he really was! For the first time he saw himself in the enormity of his sinning. It was not only the cigarettes and the one black cigar, purloined from his father, but the orgies at penny-ante, the occasional game of craps back of Mather's barn. Then he remembered other damning episodes in his black record—the time he had gone into a mathematics exam and read the formulas from Buster Bean's collar; the night he had helped Sport McGinnis smuggle a bottle of beer in for a welsh rabbit and swallowed a full third of the rank stuff. Then there was an appalling record of evasions, turnings and twistings of the exact and literal truth—

"You can't be altogether bad if you're so honeth," said Miss Jennie, in whom the instinct was lively to bring the sinner home.

"I am. I am," said Skippy lugubriously.

"Can't I help—juth a little?"

"Would you, would you really?" he said eagerly.

"Let me—pleath."

The plump little fingers came forth and met the rough hand of the sinner. Skippy squeezed them convulsively, not daring to trust his voice, nodded twice and smiled bravely back in the moonlight to show that the leaven of higher things was already beginning to work.

"How'd you get on with Margarita?" he asked Snorky when they retired for the night.

"Margarita's a pippin!" said Snorky.

"I squared you all right."

"You bet you did! She came right up and fed out of my hand. But, say, they swallowed it all right."

"What?"

"The dead game sporting life stuff."

"Yes, I know. Got a cig?"

"What? Oh yes. Get you one in a jiffy. But say. Go easy. The governor and all that sort of thing, you know."

"Nerves sort of jumpy to-night," said Skippy languidly. "Need a few whiffs to quiet 'em down."

It was something new in his life, a good influence. All his better nature rose up in response. So summoning up his courage, he lit a cigarette and tried to inhale—a desperate character, worthy to be saved, certainly ought to inhale! It was nauseating. It stung his lungs and set his head to reeling. He left the window and crawled over to the bed where he lay weak but unconquered.

"By jinks, I will inhale, I'll inhale to-morrow!" he said, seeing always the uplifting smile and the pure velvety eyes of Miss Jennie as the room waltzed around him. "It's going to be awfully hard living up to her, but I'll do it if it kills me!"

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