In the foreground of the dock was an individual who apparently didn't. He was a fashionable and frantic oldish-young man, who had burst through the barrier and now jigged upon the pier-head in a manner not countenanced by the Society for Standardizing Ballroom Dances. At intervals he made gestures toward the Tyro as if striving, against unfair odds of distance, to sweep him from the surface of creation. As the Tyro had never before set eyes upon him, this was surprising. The solution of the mystery came from the crowd, close-pressed about the Tyro. It took the form of an unmistakable sniffle, and it somehow contrived to be indubitably and rather pitifully feminine. The Tyro turned. At, or rather underneath, his left shoulder, and trying to peep over or past it, he beheld a small portion of a most woe-begone little face, heavily swathed against the nipping March wind. Through the beclouding veil he could dimly make out that the eyes were swollen, the cheeks were mottled; even the nose--with regret I state it--was red and puffy. An unsightly, melancholy little spectacle to which the Tyro's young heart went out in prompt pity. It had a habit of going out in friendly and helpful wise to forlorn and unconsidered people, to the kind of folk that nobody else had time to bother about. "What a mess of a face, poor kiddy!" said the Tyro to himself. From the mess came another sniffle and then a gurgle. The Tyro, with a lithe movement of his body, slipped aside from his position of vantage, and the pressure of the crowd brought the girl against the rail. Thereupon the Seven Saltatory Devils possessing the frame of the frantic and fashionable dock-dancer deserted it, yielding place to a demon of vocality. "I think he's calling to you," said the Tyro in the girl's ear. The girl shook her head with a vehemence which imparted not so much denial as an "I-don't-care-if-he-is" impression. Stridently sounded the voice of distress from the pier. "Pilot-boat," it yelled, and repeated it. "Pilot! Pilot! Come--back--pilot-boat." Again the girl shook her head, this time so violently that her hair--soft, curly, luxuriant hair--loosened and clouded about her forehead and ears. In a voice no more than a husky, tremulous whisper, which was too low even to be intended to carry across the widening water-space, and therefore manifestly purposed for the establishment of her own conviction, she said: "I wo-won't. I _won't_. I WON'T!!!" At the third declaration she brought a saber-edged heel down square upon the most afflicted toe of a very sore foot which the Tyro had been nursing since a collision in the squash court some days previous. Involuntarily he uttered a cry of anguish, followed by a monosyllabic quotation from the original Anglo-Saxon. The girl turned upon him a baleful face, while the long-distance conversationalist on the dock reverted to his original possession and faded from sight in a series of involuted spasms.