Amelia touched her guitar with a white, if somewhat pudgy, hand, and sang a few lines of a popular love song. Then suddenly she stopped and leaned forward, her elbows on the windowsill, her lips apart, her plump figure actually intense. The other girls edged closer to the window and listened with bated breath. A moment's hush--then, out of the night, came an echo of Amelia's guitar, and a tenor voice took up the song where she had left it. [Illustration: "Amelia touched her guitar with a white, pudgy hand"] A sigh of satisfaction went up from the group by the window, and Amelia laid one fat hand upon what she fondly believed to be the location of her heart. The stage business was appropriate, but the star's knowledge of anatomy was limited, and the gesture indicated acute indigestion. The other girls, however, were properly impressed. "It's him," murmured the fair one rapturously, as reckless of grammar as of anatomical precision. "Oh, girls, isn't it just too sweet; what a lot of feeling he puts into it!" "The way he sings 'My Love, My Own,' is simply elegant," gasped Laura May. "I shouldn't wonder a bit if he's a foreigner. They're so much more romantic over there. An Italian's just as likely as not to fall in love this way and go perfectly crazy over it." "Maybe he's a prince," Kittie Dayton suggested. "The folks on this block go round with princes and counts and earls and things all the time. Like as not he's visiting somebody, and----" "If he were an Italian prince he wouldn't sing such good English," put in Serena Adams. Serena hailed from Massachusetts and hadn't the fervid exotic imagination characteristic of the daughters of the South. "Well, earls are English." "Earls don't sing." "Why don't they?" Serena tried in vain to imagine the English earl of her fiction reading warbling love songs out of a back window to an unknown charmer, but gave it up. "I think he's a poet," Amelia whispered, "or maybe a musician--one of the high-strung, quivering kind, don't you know." They all knew. "They're so sensitive--and responsive." Amelia spoke as though a host of lute-souled artists had worshipped at her shrine and had broken into melody at her touch. "Like as not he's only a nice American fellow. My cousin Sam at Yale sings like an angel. All he has to do is sing love songs to a girl and she's positively mushy." Amelia looked reflectively at the last speaker. "Well, I wouldn't mind so much," she said. "If he lives on this block his folks must be rich." "Some day, some day," yearned the tenor voice. "Some day I shall meet you." "My, won't it be exciting when he does," gurgled Kittie. "Does he do this every night?" Serena asked. This was her first entrance into the romantic circle.