"You have, too! You've given me the slip a dozen times. Don't you know I'm crazy about you?" "Much you are!" scoffed Nance. "Go tell that to Birdie." "I'll tell it to Birdie and every one else if you like," Mac cried. "It was all up with me the first time I saw you." With his handsome, boyish face and his frilled shirt, he looked so absurdly like the choir boy, who had once sat on the fence flinging rocks at her, that she threw back her head and laughed. "You don't even know the first time you saw me," she challenged him. "Well, I know I've seen you somewhere before. Tell me where?" "Guess!" said Nance, with dancing eyes. "Wait! I know! It was on the street one night. You were standing in a drug store. A red light was shining on you, and you smiled at me." "I smiled at you because I knew you. I'd seen you before that. Once when you didn't want me to. In the factory yard--behind the gas-pipe--" "Were you the little girl that caught me kissing Bird that day?" "Yes! But there was another time even before that." He searched her face quizzically, still holding her wrists. Nance, no longer trying to free her hands, hummed teasingly, half under her breath: "Do ye think the likes of ye Could learn to like the likes o' me? Arrah, come in, Barney McKane, out of the rain!" A puzzled look swept his face; then he cried exultantly: "I've got it. It was you who let my pigeons go! You little devil! I'm going to pay you back for that!" and before she knew it, he had got both of her hands into one of his and had caught her to him, and was kissing her there in the shadow of the curtain, kissing her gay, defiant eyes and her half-childish lips. And Nance, the independent, scoffing, high-headed Nance, who up to this time had waged successful warfare, offensive as well as defensive, against the invading masculine, forgot for one transcendent second everything in the world except the touch of those ardent lips on hers and the warm clasp of the arm about her yielding shoulders. In the next instant she sprang away from him, and in dire confusion fled out of the box and down the corridor. At the door leading back into the ball-room a group of dancers had gathered and were exchanging humorous remarks about a woman who was being borne, feet foremost, into the corridor by two men in costume. Nance, craning her neck to see, caught a glimpse of a white face with a sagging mouth, and staring eyes under a profusion of tumbled red hair. With a gasp of recognition she pushed forward and impulsively seized one of the woman's limp hands. "Gert!" she cried, "what's the matter? Are you hurt?" The monk gave a significant wink at Mac, who had joined them, and the by-standers laughed. "She's drunk!" said Mac, abruptly, pulling Nance away. "Where did you ever know that woman?" "Why, it's Gert, you know, at the factory! She worked at the bench next to mine!" Her eyes followed the departing group somberly, and she lingered despite Mac's persuasion.