The auctioneer was a whiskered old man with a great flow of gab. He holds up a piece of lace--to put on a bureau or a dresser it was--made, as he put it, by beautiful Miss Riley herself. And she was beautiful! Violet eyes and blue-black hair, and--I've seen Chinese ivory since that her face was the color of, only no Chinese ivory that ever would take on the warmer waves of color as I looked at it. "How much for this lovely lace cover?" the auctioneer was asking, and "Two dollars," some one said. And right away the chief petty officer said "Five!" I looked at him then--for the first time fairly. He was one of those quiet-looking, thoughtful kind--of good height, well made and well set up--maybe twenty-two years old. There was another chief petty officer with him; and this one began telling a bystander how that young fellow who'd just bid was Jack Meagher the gun-captain--the same Meagher, yes, that the papers had been talking about--who'd dropped from his turret to his handling-room and in through a fire and shut himself up in a magazine and maybe saved the ship and the whole crew from being blown up. He'd got burnt, pretty bad--yes, but was all right now. "He's got his medal of honor for it, but he's not one to carry it around and show it," said Meagher's friend. Meagher was bidding--some one had said six dollars for the lace. Meagher had said ten, and Mary Riley's violet eyes were glowing. I had five dollars--no more--in my pocket. But there was Twinney with his tens-of-thousands allowance in the year. He always carried plenty of money around with him. "Twinney," I said, "how much money have you?" "Oh, a couple of hundred or so," and pulled it out and began to count it. "I'll bid on the lace piece," I said, "and you pay for it." "Ten dollars I'm offered for this lovely piece of lace," the auctioneer was drooning. "Do I hear----?" "Twenty," I said. Meagher looks over at me and a light comes into his eyes. "Forty," says Meagher. "Sixty," I said. "Eighty," says Meagher. The fat auctioneer looked from one to the other of us. He had not had a chance to speak since the bidding was at ten dollars. He was about to open his mouth now when---- "One hundred dollars!" I said and looked over at Meagher. Meagher turns to his chum. Before he could speak the chum was emptying his pockets to him. When he had it all counted--his chum's and his own---- "Two hundred fifty dollars," he said; "we might as well throw in the change--two hundred and sixty-five dollars," and laid it down on the table before Mary Riley. Gold of angels, but there was class to the way he did it. No millionaire's money, but the savings of an enlisted man's pay. I turned to Twinney. "He's through--make out your check for three hundred and give to me." "Three hundred dollars," he says, "for that piece of lace! Three hundred--why, five dollars would be enough for it!"