“She couldn’t seem to keep that last stuff down, Mr. Cameron,” he would say.  “I’ll try something else.”

And he would stand before his shelves, eyes upturned, searching, eliminating, choosing.

Miss Boyd attended to the general merchandise, sold stationery and perfumes, candy and fancy soaps, and in the intervals surveyed the world that lay beyond the plate glass windows with shrewd, sophisticated young eyes.

“That new doctor across the street is getting busier,” she would say.  Or, “The people in 42 have got a Ford.  They haven’t got room for a garage, either.  Probably have to leave it out at nights.”

Her sophistication was kindly in the main.  She combined it with an easy tolerance of weakness, and an invincible and cheery romanticism, as Willy Cameron discovered the night they first went to a moving picture theater together.  She frankly wept and joyously laughed, and now and then, delighted at catching some film subtlety and fearful that he would miss it, she would nudge him with her elbow.

“What d’you think of that?” she would say.  “D’you get it?  He thinks he’s getting her—­Alice Joyce, you know—­on the telephone, and it’s a private wire to the gang.”  She was rather quiet after that particular speech.  Then she added:  “I know a place that’s got a secret telephone.”  But he was absorbed in the picture, and made no comment on that.  She seemed rather relieved.

Once or twice she placed an excited hand on his knee.  He was very uncomfortable until she removed it, because he had a helpless sort of impression that she was not quite so unconscious of it as she appeared.  Time had been, and not so long ago, when he might have reciprocated her little advance in the spirit in which it was offered, might have taken the hand and held it, out of the sheer joy of youth and proximity.  But there was nothing of the philanderer in the Willy Cameron who sat beside Edith Boyd that night in body, while in spirit he was in another state, walking with his slight limp over crisp snow and sodden mud, but through magic lands, to the little moving picture theater at the camp.

Would he ever see her again?  Ever again?  And if he did, what good would it be?  He roused himself when they started toward her home.  The girl was chattering happily.  She adored Douglas Fairbanks.  She knew a girl who had written for his picture but who didn’t get one.  She wouldn’t do a thing like that.  “Did they really say things when they moved their lips?”

“I think they do,” said Willy Cameron.  “When that chap was talking over the telephone I could tell what he was saying by—­ Look here, what did you mean when you said you knew of a place that has a secret telephone?”

“I was only talking.”

“No house has any business with a secret telephone,” he said virtuously.

“Oh, forget it.  I say a lot of things I don’t mean.”  He was a little puzzled and rather curious, but not at all disturbed.