his trouble.  He was so surefooted in the race that he forgot to be abashed for the moment and came bounding down by the apple-tree.  He was full of pride.  When he stopped he was the King of Boyville and every inch a king.  The king—­not Piggy—­should be blamed.  It was all over in a second—­almost before he had stopped.  He aimed at her cheek, but he got her ear.  That was the first that he knew of it.  Piggy seemed to return to life then.  In his confusion he felt himself shrivelling up to his normal size—­shrivelling and frying.  In an instant he was gone, and Piggy Pennington ran into the group of girls on the sidewalk and let them catch him and hold him.  The breathless youths went into the house telling their adventures in the race between gasps.  But Piggy did not dare to look at his Heart’s Desire for as much as five minutes—­a long, long time.  No one had seen him beneath the apple-tree.  He was not afraid of the teasing, but he was afraid of a withering look from his Heart’s Desire,—­a look that he felt with a parching fear in his throat would throw the universe into an eclipse for him.  He observed that she got up and changed her seat to be rid of Mealy Jones.  At first Piggy thought that was a good sign, but a moment later he reasoned that the avoidance of Mealy was inspired probably by a loathing for all boys.  He dared not seek her eyes, but he mingled noisily in the crowd for a while, and then, on a desperate venture, carelessly snapped a peanut shell and hit his Heart’s Desire on the chin.  He seemed to be looking a thousand miles away in another direction than that which the missile took.  He waited nearly a minute—­a long, uncertain minute—­for a response.

Then the shell came back; it did not hit him—­but it might have done so—­that was all he could ask.  He snapped shells slyly for a quarter of an hour, and was happy.  Once he looked—­not exactly looked; perhaps peeked is the better word; took just the tiniest lightning peek out of the tail of his eye, and found a smile waiting for him.  At supper, if any one save Piggy had tried to take a chair by his Heart’s Desire when the plates came around, there would have been a fight.  Mealy Jones knew this, and he knew what Piggy did not know, that it would have been a fight of two against one.  So Piggy sat bolt upright in his chair beside the black-and-red checked dress, and talked to the room at large; but he spoke no word to the maiden at his side.  She noticed that Piggy kept dropping his knife, and the solicitude of her sex prompted her to ask:  “Are your hands cold, Winfield?”

And the instinct of his sex to hide a fault with a falsehood made Piggy nod his head.

Then she answered:  “Cold hands, a warm heart!”