It must have been fifteen minutes later that, returning from an investigation of the banging blind, I ran into Rollins stealing surreptitiously to the May Girl's door. Quite unconsciously, doubtless, but with most rapacious effect, his sparse hair was rumpled in innumerable directions, and the stealthy boy-pirate hunch to his shoulders added the last touch of melodrama to the scene. Rollins, as a gay Lothario, was certainly a new idea. I could have screamed with joy. But while I debated the ethics of screaming for joy only, the May Girl herself, as though in reply to his crafty knock, opened her door and stared frankly down at him with a funny, flushed sort of astonishment. She was in her great boyish blanket-wrapper, with her gauzy gold hair wafting like a bright breeze across her neck and shoulders, and the radiance of her I think would have startled any man. But it knocked the breath out of Rollins. "P-p-pleasant!" gasped Rollins, quite abruptly. "It was a--a _Miracle_!" "--Miracle?" puzzled the May Girl. "Wall-papers!" babbled Rollins. "Suppose it had been true?" he besought her. "To-day, I mean? Our betrothal?" With total unexpectedness he began to flutter a handfull of wall-paper samples under the May Girl's astonished nose. "I've got a little flat you know in town," babbled Rollins. "Just one room and bath. It's pretty dingy. But for a long time now I've been planning to have it all repapered. And if you'd choose the wallpaper for it--it would be pleasant to think of during--during the years!" babbled Rollins. "_What_?" puzzled the May Girl. Then quite suddenly she reached out and took the papers from Rollins's hand and bent her lovely head over them in perfectly solemn contemplation. "Why--why the pretty gray one with the white gulls and the flash of blue!" she decided almost at once, looked up for an instant, smiled straight into Rollins's fatuous eyes, and was gone again behind the impregnable fastness of her closed door, leaving Rollins gasping like a fool, his shoulders drooping, his limp hands clutching the sheet of white gulls with all the absurd manner of an amateur prima donna just on the verge of bursting into song! And all of a sudden starting to laugh I found myself crying instead. It was the expression in Rollins's eyes, I think. The one "off-guard" expression perhaps of Rollins's life! A scorching flame of self-revelation, as it were, that consumed even as it illuminated, leaving only gray ashes and perplexity. Not just the look it was of a Little-Man-Almost-Old-who-had-Never-Had-a-Chance-to-Play. But the look of a Little-Man-Almost-Old who sensed suddenly for the first time that he never _would_ have a chance to play! That Fate denying him the glint of wealth, the flash of romance, the scar even of tragedy, had stamped him merely with the indelible sign of a Person-Who-wasn't-Meant-to-be-Liked!