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 awful certainty that both of them were amused, supercilious, scornful.

He had never felt more awkward, nor more miserable. The embarrassment and stage fright attendant on his début at the Tavern had been as nothing compared with this. He could feel perspiration—what he fancied must be a veritable torrent of perspiration—on his forehead. He could feel slou'red in the traitorous inches between the back of his collar and the roots of his hair. And when he knelt, in the hush that followed the preliminary round of applause, his knee cracked, making what seemed to him a deafening report.

He began to play.

He believed he had never played worse, but in reality he played quite as usual, his fingers instinctive on the strings. Yvonne, beside him, sang a little wicked song. What Makes 'Em Dog Me Aroun'?. . . He was conscious of the motions of her hands, of the sway of her gold-sheathed body. Suggestive. Faintly indecent. Adapted to the tenor of her audience. "And I let her!" he thought, in a frenzy of self-condemnation. A man who let the girl he was going to marry stand in a public place and croon innuendos for the delight of the dissolute—what must right-minded people think of that?. ..

They presented three numbers, and when they had finished there occurred an incident unprecedented in their Tavern experience: somebody threw money at them.

They were bowing, hand in hand, and a disc of silver came spinning over the floor and lay at their feet. . . then another. . . and another. Jock, seeking wild-eyed the source of this generosity, located it as a ringside table around which was assembled a senile