He did not seem nearly so abashed as he said this as he might very well have been in the circumstances; he said it very much as if he were stating a fact, a lamentable fact the truth of which he regretted, but a fact, nevertheless. He looked dismayed and surprised when Janey Crosby and the others turned away from him.
After that Velvet Pants was an outcast. The men spoke to him only when it was necessary to do so, and then briefly and even harshly. He did not seem to understand; he would try to tell them things, making many gestures; but he had not the words to make himself clear, nor had they the inclination to listen to him.
In the evening, when the men were sitting about the porch, competing for Janey Crosby’s smiles, there was no place for him there. He had tried to join in their talk and play, to be friendly, to be one of them; they froze him out, and still he did not seem to understand that they did it because he was so flagrant a coward. At last he seemed to accept his status as a pariah without really understanding it, for he would take his guitar, which he had constructed from the ruin of an old one, and go alone into the woods. It was said that he sang there to himself, sad songs in his native tongue.
Janey Crosby’s birthday came toward the end of the harvest season, and it was the most important social event of the year in Crosby Corners. All the village was invited, and all the village came, the girls in their fresh dimities, the men, soaped and collared and uncomfortable, but happy. They brought presents, as if they were bringing tribute to a queen, and Janey, as graciously as a reigning sovereign, took them all, and smiled.
The party was held in the masonic hall, and it was an affair of considerable tone, with dancing, two helpings of ice-cream all around, and a three-piece orchestra.
The dancing was half over. Janey and Pete High, her current partner, had gone out on the porch; a harvest moon silvered the village streets.
“Look,” exclaimed Pete, “what’s that sitting down there on the horseblock?”
“It’s a man,” said Janey, her eyes following his pointing finger.
“But who can it be?”
The girl looked again, and made out a small, bent figure sitting there, chin on hands, eyes turned toward the lighted hall, ears toward the music and the buzz and laughter of the guests.