Sally’s lips parted to tell him of Nita’s threat if she did not relinquish her claim upon David’s love and friendship, but before the first word tumbled out, the old inhibition against tattling, taught her in the stern school of life in an orphanage, restrained her. “You’re all so good to me,” she choked, then turned abruptly away to where “Pitty Sing,” the midget, was impatiently awaiting her human sedan-chair. “I don’t want to influence you unduly,” the midget piped in her prim, high little voice, “but Mr. Bybee and Gus are right. You are safer with the carnival than anywhere else in the state, and if you ran away I should be very sorry. I like you, Sally. I like you very much.” The dress tent was taken down by the “white hopes” almost before the women performers had had time to change from show clothes to nightgowns and kimonos. By twelve o’clock the lot was as bare of tents and booths and ferris wheels and motordromes and “whips” and merry-go-rounds as if those mechanical symbols of joy and fun had never existed. And Sally lay on the lumpy, smelly mattress of her upper berth in the ancient Pullman car, waiting for her David’s whistled signal—a bar of “Always.” She was fully dressed. Her heart sang the words—“I’ll be loving you—always! Not for just an hour, not for just a day, not for just a year, but—always!” She could have sent word to David by Gus or Pop Bybee that she had given up her frantic plan to run away; that he need not meet her in the darkness of the pulsing, hot June night. But—she had not— It came then—clear and true, the whistled notes of the song which her heart sang to David—“I’ll be loving you—always!” She edged over the side of the berth, the toe of her slipper groping until it found the edge of the lower berth in which the midget was sleeping. When she was safe in the aisle she cast a fearful glance up and down the car, and noted with uneasy surprise that Nita’s berth, directly opposite the midget’s, was still unoccupied, the green curtains spread wide so that the grayish-white blur of the sheet and pillow was plainly discernible in the faint light from the one electric globe over the door. But she had no time now to worry about Nita or Nita’s threats. David was awaiting her—with the song still humming its sweet, extravagant promise in his heart. Or—was it? Had he chosen the song idly? Had he meant anything by that teasing kiss on the tip of her nose, by his “Dear little Sally!” “Being in love hurts something terrible,” Sally shook her head at her own turbulent emotions, unconsciously employing the homely language of the orphanage. “But even if he doesn’t love me I’m glad I love him. David, David!” CHAPTER VIII The night was eerie with voices from unseen bodies, or bodies half-revealed in the flare of gasoline torches, as the business of loading the carnival proceeded. Soft, rich voices from black men’s throats blended with the velvety softness of the late-June night: