"Do you want to stand at the edge of the floor all evening? Or do you want to dance with me?" He smiled back and they danced. He heard the click only once in a while over the orchestra's rhythm. And he paid no attention to it. There were many high heels here, and all high heels make that clicking sound. He lost himself in the promises in the slightly hard blue eyes just below the level of his own eyes. And he stopped his ears to the queer clicking, which sounded as he moved, for the rest of the evening. But after he had left the blond and returned home, when he was walking from the garage to his grandfather's house, he couldn't stop his ears any more. The clicking was too infernally loud in the stillness that clutches city streets at three in the morning. And there wasn't a person within blocks that he could blame the noise on. Click, click, click came the sound, as he walked along through the night. Exactly as though a woman's high heels clicked beside him. High, _red_ heels.... He stopped to light a cigarette which he thrust between disdainful, half-sneering lips. And the clicking stopped. He went on toward his grandfather's house--and the light, precise tapping continued, a click for every step he took, like a ghost-thing marching in step beside him. An unseen ghost-thing.... "Hell take it!" he said angrily aloud in the night. "I suppose this is a sample of what they call remorse. Well I'll be damned if I----" * * * * * The light was on in the house. That was strange, at this hour of the night. Gruin hurried to the door--with the neat, small clicking increasing as his steps quickened. His grandfather opened the door before he could insert his key--and the old man was icily angry. "Eldon," he said, "I want to speak to you, in the library." Gruin followed him to the room in which he had received most of the old boy's rebukes. It was a psychological wood-shed where a verbal strap was applied to him. But this time the strap was unjustified to the point of being bizarre. "You have tried my patience to its extreme limit," the old man said, ice-blue eyes smoldering. "You have achieved your final indiscretion. How dare you bring a girl to this house and sneak her in when my back is turned? And above all, a girl named Maria--after what happened a few weeks ago? To this house!" Gruin's bewilderment was complete. "What on earth are you talking about?" "You deny you brought some girl to this house, to your room, secretly?" "I certainly do. I've never----" "Come upstairs, Eldon," the old man interrupted grimly.