She rose, laughing with all her shrillness, and Laurence would have risen too, but Miss Mears, shouting, “Hay, there, Mister!” easily pushed him down, for the polished floor was slippery and gave no footing. Laurence tried again, and again the merry damsel aided him to prostrate himself. This mortifying process was repeated and repeated until it attracted the attention of most of the guests, while bumping stopped and the bumpers gathered to look on; even to take an uproarious part in the contest. Some of them pushed Daisy; some of them pushed Laurence; and the latter, furious and scarlet, with his struggling back arched, and his head lowering among his guests’ shoes and slippers, uttered many remonstrances in a strangled voice. Finally, owing to the resentful activity of the fat Eliot boy, who remembered his stummick and pushed Daisy with ungallant vigour, the dishevelled Laurence once more resumed the upright position of a man, but only to find himself closely surrounded by rosily flushed faces, all unpleasantly mirthful at his expense. The universe seemed to be made of protuberant, taunting eyes and noisy open mouths. “Ya-a-a-ay, Laur-runce!” they vociferated. A lock of his own hair affected the sight of one of his eyes; a single hair of his late opponent was in his mouth, where he considered a hair of anybody’s out of place, and this one peculiarly so, considering its source. Miss Mears herself, still piercing every tympanum with her shrillness, rolled upon the floor but did not protract her hilarity there. Instead she availed herself of him, and with unabated disrespect, came up him hand-over-hand as if he had been a rope. Then, as he strove to evade her too-familiar grasp, there fell a sorry blow. Beyond the nearer spectators his unhampered eye caught the brazen zigzag gleam of orderly curls moving to the toss of a dainty head; and he heard the voice of Elsie, incurably sweet in tone, but oh, how destroying in the words! Elsie must have heard some grown person say them, and stored them for effective use. “Pooh! Fighting with that rowdy child!” “Fightin’?” shouted Miss Mears. “_That_ wasn’t fightin’!” “It wasn’t?” Thomas Kimball inquired waggishly. “What was it?” And he added with precocious satire: “I s’pose you call it makin’ love!” To Laurence’s horror, Master Kimball’s waggish idea spread like a virulent contagion, even to Laurence’s most intimate friends. “Ya-a-ay, Laur-runce!” they shouted. “Daisy Mears is your _girl_! Daisy Mears is Laurunce’s _girl_! Oh, Laur-_runce_!” He could only rage and bellow. “She is _not_! You hush up! I hate her! I hate her worse’n I do _any_body!” But his protests were disallowed and shouted down; the tormentors pranced, pointing at him with hateful forefingers, making other dreadful signs, sickening him unutterably. “Day-zy Mears and Laur-runce Coy! Daisy Mears is Laurunce’s _girl_!”