“No, mother,” he replied, and moved away from her gently, with the fragrance of the thyme strong in his consciousness.

His mother put her sweet nosegay in water.  Then she went to bed, and Anderson sat on the stoop.  Young Eastman and the Van Dorn girl passed after he sat there, and he thought with a loving passion of protection of poor little Charlotte alone at home.  “I’ll warrant the poor child is watching for that good-for-nothing scoundrel this minute,” he told himself.  He would have liked to knock young Eastman down; it would have delighted his soul to kick him; he would have given a good deal to have had him at the top of the steps.

The weather was intensely warm.  He heard his mother fling her bedroom blinds wide open to catch all the air.  The sky was clear, but all along the northwest horizon was a play of lightning from a far-distant storm.

Anderson lit another cigar.  The night seemed to grow more and more oppressive.  When a breath of wind came, it was like a hot breath of some fierce sentiency.  A disagreeable odor from something was also borne upon it.  The odors of the flowers seemed in abeyance.  The play of blue-and-rosy light along the northwest horizon continued.  Anderson got a certain pleasure from watching it.  Nature’s spectacularity diverted him, as if he had been a child, from his own affairs, which seemed to give him a dull pain.  Between the flashes he asked himself why.

“It is just right,” he told himself; “just what I desired.  Why do I feel this way?”

Presently he decided with self-deception that it was because of the recent scene in the drug store.  He remembered quite distinctly the young man’s gaze at the stout, blue-eyed girl.  “What right had the fellow to look at another girl after that fashion?” he said to himself.  Then it struck him suddenly as being perhaps impossible for him ever to look at Charlotte in just that fashion.  He thought with a thrill of indignant pride that there was a maiden who would have the best of love as her right.  Then sitting there he heard a quick tread and a trill of whistle as meaningless as that of a robin, and young Eastman himself came alongside.  He stopped before the gate.

“Hullo!” he said, suddenly.

“Hullo!” responded Anderson.

“Got a match?” said Eastman.

“Sure.”

Eastman sprang up the steps until he came in reach of Anderson’s proffered handful of matches.  “Hotter ’n blazes,” he remarked, as he scratched a match on his trousers leg.

“Hottest night of the season so far, I think,” responded Anderson.

“I’m about beat out with it,” said Eastman, lighting his cigar with no difficulty in the dead atmosphere.  He threw himself sprawling on the step at Anderson’s feet, without any invitation.  “Whew!” he sighed.

“It ’ll be hotter than hades in the City to-morrow,” he remarked, after a moment’s silence.

Anderson muttered an assent.  He was considering as nervously as a woman whether he should say anything to this boy.  While he was hesitating, young Eastman himself led up to it.