Nobody thought of being ready for home until nearly ten o'clock; and long before that Miss Stein's nerves felt as if they had been run, like threads, through the eyes of hot needles. Again Win had helped her in the afternoon by placing blouses of congenial colours together on the counters instead of letting them lie anyhow, as Miss Stein, in her recklessness, would have done. But less than ever had the elder girl seen reason for thanking Miss Child when the second instalment of "punk" goods was brought out of "reserve."

If the first lot had not gone off so soon they would not have been saddled with this, and so 2884 had, in Miss Stein's estimation, done nothing at the end of the day except "show herself off" and make everybody work twice as hard as necessary. She would not tell Win how to put things away, or let anybody else help her out.

"You gotta learn for yourself or you never will," she said sharply, all the more sharply because Fred Thorpe, the floorwalker, happened to be within earshot.

"I don't care what he thinks of me!" she said fiercely to herself, knowing that Thorpe would understand and disapprove her injustice to the new girl. But it was only half true that she did not care.

She was longing desperately for somebody to love her; and though she could not in decency have accepted, after the way she had treated him, she wished that Thorpe would ask her to have supper with him that night. The Westlake pig, she knew, was going to Dorlon's for a pan roast with Horrocks, for the creature had told all the girls who were sure to run with it to her, Dora Stein. Thorpe would have been a faded flag to flaunt in the face of the enemy—a floorwalker, to one who had mashed a department manager! Still it would have been comforting to know that she still had attractions for some one, and at least she would have liked the chance to refuse an invitation.

Thorpe, on his part, would joyfully have asked her, for he could not quite "unlove" the beautiful face he had once adored, though he knew now exactly what a fierce spirit lived behind it. He was well aware of his own weakness and was humble enough to confuse with it the kindness of heart which permitted such treatment as he had received.

No girl, not even Dora Stein herself, would dare risk offending any other of the floorwalkers, men able to break a saleswoman if they "got a down" on her. But Dora knew only too well that he would not demean himself to take revenge on her or any one. And probably she believed that he would not punish or even "call her down" for injustice to a newcomer.

Thorpe was miserable that night, for he had missed few incidents of the day in Dora's neighbourhood. He recognized a "live wire" when he saw one, and he did see that 2884 had "stuff" in her. She deserved to be praised, and encouragement was all that she needed to turn her into a valuable saleswoman, one who might become a "real winner" some day. He could help her by speaking a few kind words, but Miss Stein would think them spoken on purpose to spite her, and that wouldn't do 2884 much good if she stayed in the blouse department. Also he could help her by mentioning in the right quarter her generalship in the matter of the "Pavlovas" instead of letting Dora take the credit. But if he did the girl any sort of justice he would be harming Miss Stein.

"I don't know what to do! I guess I shall have to leave the thing to Providence—and the devil take the hindmost!" he thought gloomily.

It seemed to Win, as she went out at last, a week since she had come in by the same door. It was like a play she had seen, where, in the second act, the people who had been young in the first were middle-aged when the curtain next rose; and in the third they were old, all in the course of a few hours. But a year or two seemed to drop from her shoulders when she caught sight of Miss Kirk waiting for her in the street. Beside Miss Kirk, to the surprise of 2884, towered the lion tamer.

"Well, I thought you'd never come!" was the greeting of Sadie. "But all's well that ends well. And Mr. Teddy Lion here wants to take us some place for a little supper."

"That ain't no way to interdooce me to the lady, kid," said the big fellow. "She won't look my way if you treat me light like that. My name's Earl Usher. Honest truth, 'tis, off the bills! Y'will come along, won't you?"

"You're very kind," Win began in the conventional way that he had laughed at in the morning. Then, afraid of being teased again, she said that she must go home.

"I don't know what my landlady will think," she excused herself. "I walked out early this morning, never dreaming I should be gone until late at night."

"Well, she can't kill you," suggested Miss Kirk, "and, anyhow, you're leavin' the end of the week. I think you'll be real mean if you won't come. I know what your reason is, and so does he. He ain't nobody's fool. Do you s'pose I'm the sort would do anything myself, or ask you to do anything, that wasn't all right? We ain't in the Four Hundred, nor yet in court circles, I don't think. And this ain't London nor it ain't Boston. Thank Gawd it's little old N'York."

"But—-" Win persisted, and stopped.

"I know what's got her goat," said Earl Usher. "It's that slush o' mine this morning about not bein' a millionaire and my face needin' to be fed. I thought afterward 'that's no talk for a gen'leman to use before a lady.' Well, I may not be a millionaire at present, but I can see my way to feedin' our t'ree faces and not feel the pinch."

"Ain't you the fresh guy?" exclaimed Miss Kirk. "Our faces are our own, thank you just the same, and this is a Dutch treat. You might 'a' knowed we'd stick that close to ettiket. I can run to fifteen cents, as far as I'm concerned How is it with you, Miss Child?"

"I can run to that, too," said Win.

"Same here," announced the big young man; "though I'd set my heart on t'other kind o' treat. Where shall it be? I suppose we mustn't think o' the Waldorf—what?"

"Huh!" snorted Miss Kirk, "not for mine, if I owned the mint! I bin to the Waldorf wunst, of course. I went just out of curiosity to see how the swells et. Wunst is enough, like goin' to the menagerie. Y'owe it to yer intelligence to see all the different forms of animal life the good Lord has created, behavin' accordin' to their kind, and then come back to your own, thankin' Gawd you're not as they are. We'll eat at Ginger Jim's, where we can lean our elbows on the tables and get perfectly good oyster soup for ten cents a head!"

They walked for a while, Earl Usher insisting on the two girls taking his arms, one on either side. By and by they got into a crosstown car, and it was when Win was being helped out by the lion tamer that a motor dashed past. The existence of people who went about in splendid gray motor cars seemed to Win so far away from her own just then that, standing in the street, her hand in Earl Usher's, she gazed into the large, lighted window of the automobile as she might have gazed through a powerful telescope at a scene of family life on Mars.

There were two girls in evening dress and two young men in the illuminated chariot. It flashed by like a Leonid, but left a gay impression of flower-tinted velvet cloaks and ermine and waved hair with a glitter of diamonds and oval white shirtfronts and black coats. Also a pair of eyes seemed to look for the twentieth part of a second into Winifred's.

"I don't believe it was he!" she said to herself when the motor had gone by.



CHAPTER XII

BLUE PETER

Peter Rolls, Sr., and Peter junior were both unhappy in vastly different ways. One difference was that Peter junior knew he was unhappy and suspected why. Peter senior had no idea that what he suffered from was unhappiness. He thought that it was indigestion, and he supposed that feeling as he felt was the normal state of men passing beyond middle age. When you were growing old you could not expect to keep much zest or personal interest in life or to enjoy things, so he had always been told; and dully, resignedly, he believed what "they" said.

If any one had told him that he was a miserable man he would have been angry, and also surprised. Why the dickens should he be miserable? He considered himself one of the most successful men in New York, and his greatest pleasure was in recalling his successes, step by step, from the time before he got his foot on the first rung of the ladder all the way up to the top.

Often he lay awake at night pondering on those first days and first ambitions. If he began to think of them when he went to bed it was fatal. He became so pleasantly excited, and the past built itself up so realistically all about him, that he could not go to sleep for hours. What a sensational "bed book" is to some tired brains, that was his past to the head of the Hands. Besides, he had everything in the world that he or anybody else (it seemed to him) could possibly want. Perhaps it was a little irritating when you could have all you wanted not to know what to want. But, he consoled himself, that must be so with all rich people. The best thing was not to think about it.

He was convinced that he loved mother as dearly as ever a husband had loved a wife. They were uncomfortable together, but wretched apart. That was marriage. There was nothing more in it.

They hadn't much to say to each other. But you never saw husbands and wives chatting together like love birds after the honeymoon. You wanted a bright-cheeked, laughing girl, and you got her. If you were faithful to each other, and didn't have rows, it was an ideal match, especially if there were children.

Peter Rolls was very fond of his children. When they were little they had been the joy of his life; the thought of them had been the only one that warmed his heart and gave him almost superhuman energy to take the future by the horns like a bull and force a ring through its bleeding nose that it might be ready for them to ride when they grew up.

Now they were grown up, and they were riding; and it was natural that the fire of the heart should have calmed. He was proud of the pair, very proud. Pete (no, he mustn't call him by that name. Ena didn't like it, said it sounded common) Peter—or Petro, if he preferred—was a gentleman and made a good show for every dollar that had been spent on him. Put him with an Astor or a Livingston and you couldn't tell the difference!

Once, a long time ago, old Peter had dreamed of a young Peter succeeding him in the business; but Ena had made him see what a foolish dream that was—foolish and inconsistent, too—because, what was the good of slaving to satisfy your ambition, and then, when you reached the goal, instead of profiting by what you'd got, ordering your heir down to the level you'd worked to leave behind?

Peter senior had entirely come round to Ena's view, and instead of regretting that Peter junior hadn't in him the making of a hard-boiled man of business who'll do anything to succeed, father stopped Peter abruptly whenever he showed an inconvenient sign of interest in the Hands and what went on under the glitter of their rings. Nor was Peter's interest of the right kind. It was not what Peter senior called practical.

Ena, now! There was a girl to be proud of. Father was so proud that pride of his splendid daughter had frozen out or covered with ashes the glow which used to fill his heart at the thought of her. But pride was the right thing! That was what he had worked for: to make of his children a man and woman to be proud of when the top stone was on his pile.

Ena was more than a lady. She was an orchid, a princess. She ruled father with her little finger—a beautifully manicured, rose-and-white finger, such as he had hardly seen when he was young. There was so much of himself in Ena that Peter yielded to her mandates as to the inarticulate cry of his own soul translated into words. The princess in whose veins his blood ran must understand what he ought to want better than he himself could understand.

She said: What was the fun of having money if you couldn't know all the best people everywhere, and be of them as well as merely among them? She began saying this even before she came home "for good" from school. It was a school for millionaires' daughters, and the daughters of other millionaires had showed her the difference between her father and theirs, oil magnates and steel and railway magnates, and magnates who magnated on their ancestors' fortunes made in land or skins of animals.

Nothing really worth having—nothing really worth father's years of hard work—could come to them as a family until Peter Rolls ceased to identify himself personally with the Hands, Ena had pleaded, and at last the head of the establishment engaged an official "understudy" to represent him every day in the gorgeously furnished office which had seemed to old Peter what the body is to the soul.

Rolls senior and Henry Croft, the man he appointed as dictator, corresponded daily, by letter and telephone, but Peter Rolls himself was not supposed to enter the great commercial village he had brought together under one roof. Ena was able to say to any one rude enough to ask, or to those she suspected of indiscreet curiosity: "Father never goes near the place. He's tired of business, and, luckily, he doesn't need to bother."

She would not much have cared whether the statement were true or not if she were sure that the carefully careless sounding words were believed. But it would have been distressing to have any one say: "Ena Rolls pretends that her father doesn't work in the shop any more, but I know for a fact that he goes every day." So it comforted her to feel sure that her arguments had really impressed father and that he never did go to the Hands unless, perhaps twice a year or so for important meetings. It pleased her that he had joined a rich club in New York which had enough "swell" members to make it pleasant for her to remark casually, "Father belongs to the Gotham."

When father went to New York in the evening, as he often did, not returning to Sea Gull Manor till late, and sometimes staying away all night, he used to say as an excuse to mother or Ena: "I'm going to the club." After a while it was taken for granted, and he made no excuse at all. But if Ena had known the mystery of those late evenings she would have been struck with fear—the fear which comes of finding out that those we think we know best are strangers to us.

Of all the sad millionaires of New York who pin together the pages of certain mysterious life chapters not to be read by eyes at home, perhaps no other had a mystery like that of Peter Rolls. It was now the one thing that he intensely enjoyed; but it was a guilty, furtive enjoyment which made a nervous wreck of him and ruined a stomach once capable of salvation.

Peter junior had never been entirely happy since he left Yale at twenty-three. It was only then that he began to look life in the face and see the freckles on its complexion The minute he saw them on that countenance which should be so beautiful, he wanted to help in some way to rub them off. To help—to help! That was the great thing.

He didn't care much for business, but he felt that, being Peter Rolls's only son, it was his duty to care. He imagined father deeply hurt at the indifference of his two children to that which had been his life—hurt, but hiding the wound with proud reserve. So Peter junior determined to sacrifice himself. He offered to go into the shop, to begin at the bottom if father wished, and in learning all there was to learn, gradually work up to a place where he could be a staff to lean upon.

It was in the "library" that they had this talk—an immense and appalling room, all very new oak panelling and very new, uniform sets of volumes bound in red leather and gold, with crests and bookplates, bleakly glittering behind glass doors. Peter senior tried to kill time there, because a library seemed to his daughter the right background for a father, and Peter junior, who had saved mother's poor old furniture for his own rooms, found it singularly difficult to open his heart between walls that smelled of money and newness. However, he did his best to blunder out the offer of himself; while the chill gleam in his father's eyes (so remarkably like that of the bookcase glass doors) made him feel, as he went on, that he must have begun all wrong.

"So you don't trust your own father?" was the answer he got when he stopped, as one might be stopped short by the sharp edge of a marble mantelpiece when trying to find the way across a dark room.

"Don't—trust you?" stammered Peter, sure now that he was a fool not to understand, not to have made his father understand.

"You think the old man's got past running his own business, and if you don't want your money to go to the dogs you must look after it yourself."

"Good heavens, no!" Peter broke out. "You can't dream that any such thought entered my mind! I—why, Father, I'd rather die than have you believe that of me."

"Prove I'm wrong, then," said the elder dryly, pulling, as was his habit, a thin, grizzled beard with thin, sallow fingers. "You can do it easy enough."

"How? Only tell me."

"By turning your attention to other things, my boy. Leave me alone to manage what I know how to manage. You let me do it my own way, without shoving in your oar, and don't you listen to what any of your highbrow friends say about me and my methods behind my back."

"As if I would!"

"Well, I wasn't sure. You go with a set of raw boys who think they know better than their fathers how to run creation; and now and then you blow off some of those soap-bubble ideas in your conversation. I've been kind of hurt once in a while, though I didn't let it out. But now we're on the subject I will say: if you've got faith in the old man, hands off the Hands!"

"That settles it, Father," returned Peter heavily. "I never meant to hinder, only to help if I could. From now on the watchword is, 'hands off the Hands!'"

This was a promise, and he kept it scrupulously. But the steady fire in his heart was scattered as a flaming log is broken into many embers by the clumsy stab of a poker. He had no longer a settled aim in life. He saw no niche which he could fill, and felt that the world had no particular use for the second Peter Rolls. The one thing he had longed for as a boy, which did not now in his young manhood appear stale and unprofitable, was a journey round the world and a glimpse of the East. When his father said uneasily: "Why don't you travel, my boy?" Peter answered that perhaps it would be a good thing.

The subject was broached to mother, and mother did not object. She had learned long ago, when she was first married to Peter, never to object to anything that he proposed. When she smiled and agreed with every suggestion she was a dear little woman, and so she had spent her existence in being a dear little woman until her hair turned white. With her sunny nature, it had not needed a very great effort; but sometimes, since Peter had begun to grow up, he had dimly fancied a look of wistfulness in her ever-young blue eyes—eyes of a girl gazing out from the round, rosy-apple face of a middle-aged woman.

She was always the same in her ways and manner, if it could be called manner: comfortable and comforting, contented with life as it was, happy in her children, and putting up gently with her husband; but—when you had said good-bye to her you remembered the look which always changed instantly into a smile when it met yours. You remembered, and seemed to see another woman hovering wraithlike behind mother's plump figure, as she sat contentedly crocheting those endless strips of trimming for towels and things—mother as she might have been if no dominating nature had ringed hers in with an iron fence.

When Peter was up the White Nile, in elephant and lion land, he used suddenly, mysteriously, to see an irrelevant vision of his mother just stretching out plump arms to say good-bye to him in his own room which he had furnished with the mahogany odds and ends that had started her bridal housekeeping. She had smiled and had not seemed to mind very much his going—not half as much as a hen mother minds its duckling's first dash into water. And yet her eyes—There are some things it hurts and at the same time warms your heart to think of at the other end of the world.

Peter had gone up the White Nile to shoot big game; but when he met it face to face, on a social equality, so to speak, he wondered how he could ever have harboured so monstrously caddish a design. He found the animals he had thought he wanted to kill so much handsomer and more important than himself that he felt like begging the alleged "game's" pardon for calling on it without invitation in its country home (as if he'd been a book agent), and bowed himself away with only a few photographs to remember it by. While Ena was working up conversations to the point of mentioning "my brother, who is such a great shot, you know, and is shooting big game in Africa," Peter's only shots were snapshots, and he was too stupidly conscientious to atone for his weakness by obtaining elephant tusks and lion skins with coins instead of bullets.

He wished he had saved Egypt and its temples for his honeymoon, in case he should ever find exactly the right girl, for the mystery and wonder made him sad because he had nobody to feel it with him. It was the same in India and all the East, and there were thousands of thoughts imprisoned in his breast (which he hardly understood and dared not let escape) by the time he arrived in England to meet Ena.

They were still struggling in prison when he went on board the Monarchic, but there a light shone fitfully through the keyhole of the cell. It was a beautiful light, almost beautiful enough to be a light Peter had read and dreamed of which was said never to shine on land or sea. Then, suddenly and surprisingly, it went out. The prison, full of thoughts, was left a place of dark confusion.

This was the inner state of Peter Rolls, Jr., when he arrived at home after his long absence. But outwardly he appeared to be much as usual, and was so nice to the Irish guests that Ena was grateful, though never remorseful. Indeed, she had so much to think about that she almost forgot her little act of diplomacy in eliminating an undesirable sister-in-law.

She was on tenterhooks lest Lord Raygan and his mother and sister should be finding the menage at Sea Gull Manor "all wrong," and laughing secretly at father and mother. If there had been that fear about the dressmaker's model on top of the rest of her anxieties she would have broken down with nervous prostration. But, thanks to her for saving him (without his knowledge), Peter seemed to have got over his silliness and was able to stand by her like a brick.

Lady Raygan, a singularly young-looking, red-faced woman of boyish figure, and with stick-out teeth, was a leading militant suffragette. When she embarked hastily for Queenstown she had just been rescued by her son from the London police. At first she had been too seasick to care that she was being carried past her home and that a series of lectures she had intended giving would be delayed. Now, in America, she had determined to make the best of a bad bargain by sending the fiery cross through the States.

She stayed in her room and jotted down notes. Also, she conscientiously tried to make Mrs. Rolls a suffragette. About most other things she was absent-minded; therefore Ena did not waste gray matter in worrying over the impression that Sea Gull Manor was making on Lady Raygan.

It was Rags and Eileen whose observing eyes and sense of humour had to be feared. Eileen, for instance, had a little way of saying that anything she considered odd was "too endlessly quaint." Things she admired were "melting." If only Ena had known enough about earls and their families to be sure whether Lord Raygan and Eileen would, in their secret hearts, think the ways of the Rollses endlessly quaint or melting, she might have been spared sleepless nights. Because the difference between those two adjectives would mean the difference between ecstasy and despair for her. Rags might be poor for an earl, even an Irish earl, but he was hardly the sort to propose to a girl his sister could speak of as "endlessly quaint."

Twelve days after they had arrived at Sea Gull Manor, Eileen wrote a somewhat ungrammatical letter to a rich cousin in Dublin who had once refused Rags, and in which she said:

DEAR POBBLES:

I wish you were here to pinch me. Then I would be sure whether I'm asleep or awake. You'll know by the papers (s'pose poor old Rags is worth a paragraph; anyhow Mubs is, now she's turned into a suff) how we got carried on in the Monarchic to New York. It won't be the fault of American reporters if you've missed our news! They got at us on the dock. Mubs loved it. Rags didn't.

Well, if you know a thing about us, since we were swept past Queenstown by a giant wave that carried us on its back all the way to America, you know we're staying with a family named Rolls. Rags met Miss Rolls and her brother in London. And afterward they happened to be on board our ship, so we chummed up, and Miss Rolls would give up her melting suite to poor half-dead Mubs and me. What a beast the sea is! I don't know if I shall ever have the courage to go on the disgusting old wet thing again. We came here to stay a fortnight, but it's almost that now, and we couldn't be driven away with a stick.

We're having the time of our lives (I'm learning lots of creamy American slang), and the Rollses are awfully kind. Ena is very nice, when she doesn't try to talk as if she were English, and quite handsome, with fine eyes, though not so good as her brother's. And he—the brother, I mean—is the dearest thing in the shape of a man you ever saw. Not that he's wonderfully handsome or anything, but, as they say over here, he's just IT. I don't know what there is about him, but—well, if I go on, I suppose you'll think I'm being silly.

I don't care; you were only a year older than I am now when you told Rags kindly to go to the dickens. You said he cared only for your money, poor Rags! That wasn't true. But now (I know you won't tell) Ena R. is going for him for all she's worth. Mubs doesn't notice anything about women except their being suffs or not; and I'm supposed to be too young to twig what's going on. I need hardly mention, however, that very little gets past yours truly. I shouldn't wonder if Ena'd bring it off. Rags asks me sometimes in a sheep-faced sort of way what I think of things here, and I would have a joyous laugh with him if it weren't for the brother.

Goodness gracious, but they're rich, these Rollses! I could make a pun about their name and their money, but I won't, because it would be cheap, and nothing is cheap at Sea Gull Manor. You can get a faint idea what the house and the view are like from the hand-painted sketch at the top of this paper on the left of the fat gold crest. This stationery is in all the guests' private sitting-rooms in case any one wants to make distant friends envious of their surroundings. Mr. Rolls, Sr., told me he kept a tame artist painting these things at a salary of ten thousand dollars a year, dinner and luncheon menus thrown in. Ena's idea. She wanted something original, and what she wants goes! So says Mr. R.

He's a poor little, yellow shrimp of a man, with dead-black hair, where it isn't gray or coming off, and the same kind of beard goats have. His eyes may have been nice when he was young, but nothing like his son Peter's. Young Peter is altogether different from old Peter, and he has blue eyes like the quaintest and most melting mother you ever saw.

She does nothing but crochet trimming for sheets and things, world without end, and if you admire it she gives you some. But she was just born to be a mother, and even having her sit crocheting in a room where you are makes you feel good. She has eyes as blue as bluebells, and as young, an apple face with a smile that longs for something it's never known, and any amount of smooth white hair, which she does in just the wrong way, pinched into tight braids. The one thing she won't do for her daughter is to have a maid of her own, and Ena keeps apologizing for it.

Mr. Rolls is a terrible dyspeptic, and the only things he can digest (he has told me and Rags several times) are soft-shelled crabs, devilled, and plum pudding or cake. When he has a pain he paces floors like a tiger, but does not roar.

I haven't met many Americans here yet because the Rollses somehow don't seem to know the right ones, and Ena makes excuses for that, too. I wish she wouldn't. It gets on my nerves, and Rag's nerves as well, I fancy, though he doesn't say so, and he's thinking a lot about whether she'll do. Because I haven't met many others, I don't know whether or not the Rollses are just like all American millionaires who don't come abroad, or unique. But I have an idea they're unique.

This is the most enormous house, built and named to please Ena, though it's no more a manor than the Albert Hall is. I don't believe she knows what "manor" means. Every bedroom I've seen (and I think I've been shown all, if I haven't lost count) has its own bathroom adjoining, and a sitting-room as well. In each bathroom there are several different kinds of baths, and a marble one you step down into, but it's bitterly cold on your spine—the only cold thing in the house, which is so hot with a furnace that even the walls and floors feel warm, although I keep my windows wide open day and night.

The pillow-cases and sheets are made of such rich, thick linen, and are so smooth and polished that you slip down off your pillows with a crick in your neck, and the sheets slide off you, just as if they were made of heavy silver, like lids of dishes. Perhaps the monograms and crests drag them down. It's awful, but it's grand. And I should think there are at least twenty footmen with—if you'll believe me—powdered hair!

Of course, poor Ena took a fancy to it in England. I don't think she stayed at any houses, but she was at some hotel where they have it, so she didn't see why not. If you ring a bell, dozens of these helpless-looking, white-headed creatures in black and yellow simply swarm from every direction, like great insects when you've poured hot water into their hive—or hole.

If any really nice people happen to stop in their motor for any reason at the house in the morning, say about eleven o'clock, they are offered magnums of champagne, as if out of gratitude for their coming. They hardly ever seem to do more than sip, so perhaps the black and yellow insects get the rest. There's an English butler, and it would make your heart bleed, or else you'd want to howl, if you saw his agonized, apologetic look whenever you, as a British person, knowing about other ways of running a house, happened to catch his elderly eye.

Mr. and Mrs. Rolls get up at goodness knows what hour and have breakfast together, so does Petro—that's the nickname for the son. But Ena and Mubs and Rags and I can wallow as long as we like and have gorgeous breakfasts in our rooms. Mubs thinks Mrs. R. is a fool, because she can hardly understand what a woman wants with a vote, but I think she's a dear. She sends cartloads of flowers to hospitals, and if you speak of a charity she hauls handfuls of dollar bills out of an immense gold chain bag she always carries on her arm because Petro gave it to her for a birthday present, and it, and Ena's one, a size smaller, has the fat air of containing all her luggage ready to start off from Saturday to Monday at a moment's notice. I suppose it's money that looks so plump.

Now do you think Rags ought to resist the daughter of such a house when church mice have long ago cut our acquaintance? Of course, Rags is lucky at bridge (he gave me a lovely dress on board ship), but he can't live on it regularly. So far it's a toss up. I'll let you know how things go.

Mubs is writing an article for an American newspaper which has offered her fifty pounds. This is the first fun she's ever got out of being a countess—and now I shouldn't wonder if she'd be a dowager soon! As for me, I'm trying to flirt with Petro. No, to be honest, that isn't quite true. I'm not exactly flirting. He's too good for that. Ena says he's "glue," because he has no interest in life, and that it'll cheer him up if I encourage him to talk to me about some philanthropical schemes he has.

One is a "Start in Life Fund" for deserving and clever young people who need only a hand up to get on. I wish I could go in for it myself—but perhaps I'm not deserving or clever. Anyhow Ena says her brother likes me awfully, better than any girl he ever saw before, and that he thinks me pretty. Did you ever? No wonder I like him! I shouldn't mind his knowing that I do, as Ena says he thinks no girl could care for him. That sounds pathetic. I let her know that, as he's so despairingly modest, she might break it to him that I enjoy his society. Since then he's been much nicer, though, perhaps still a little absent-minded, which may come from being "blue." I should like to know what Ena said to him! But I suppose it's all right!

Your chum and cousin, EILY.

P.S. They've got a shop in New York. I forgot to tell you that—a huge shop. It's never mentioned here, but Petro told me. He's not ashamed, but rather proud of the way the money came. Rags wants him and Ena to take us to the place.

What Ena did say to Peter was, "Poor little Eileen is falling in love with you." Peter didn't believe it. But it put a strange idea into his head.



CHAPTER XIII

ONE MAN AND ANOTHER

"No. 2884 Child, W. Pay Envelope. Details under flap," Winifred read on the neat, pale-brown packet put into her hand the night when she had served Peter Rolls for a week—or was it five hundred weeks? "READ THE OTHER SIDE" was printed in capital letters of white upon a black background on the flap which must be torn open to get at the contents and "details." The latter consisted of "Deductions, Absent, Late Fines, Keys, Mdse., Stamps, Beneficial Ass., and Sub. Slips."

But Win had been neither absent nor late. Being an extra hand only, and liable to be "dispensed with" at the end of the holidays, she had not needed to subscribe her hard-earned pennies to Beneficial Assurance, that huge fund made up of weekly coppers, whose interest was to Peter Rolls almost what "Peter's Pence" are to the Pope. Thanks to her good health and good behaviour, "Cash Enclosed" (as secretly mentioned under the flap) was practically intact. But it had been a nightmare week which seemed longer than all the past weeks of her life added together and if she had earned a hundred dollars instead of six she would not have felt too highly paid.

She moved wearily away from the office window, obeying the directions to "read other side," and as she walked down the long corridor (her sore feet causing her to limp slightly) the words "if sick or disabled, notify employment bureau at once" sang through her head, keeping time with her uneven steps.

She was "reading the other side," the other side of life which appeared to her as separate from the side she had known as the bright was separate from the dark side of the moon; the side about which people seldom troubled and never saw. A few weeks ago, before that "wild spirit" of hers lured her half across the world to find independence, she would have thought, feeling as she felt to-night, that she was both sick and disabled. But now she knew that hundreds of other girls under this very roof felt just as she felt, and that they took it for granted as a normal condition of life. They hardly pitied themselves, and she must be as stoical. If once she lost courage, she might do the thing she had boasted to Peter Rolls, Jr., that she would never do—cry.

She thought to find a tonic effect from the sight of money earned, and in taking out her six dollars, she let fall a slip of white paper from the pay envelope. It fluttered away, to alight on the floor, and Win's heart beat as she picked it up.

Her discharge already? What could she have done to be sent off at the end of a week—she who had tried so hard? And how strange that, tired and disheartened as she was, she should actually fear discharge! A minute ago she had been asking herself, "How many weeks like this can I live through?" and wishing that an end, almost any end, might come. Yet here she was dreading to turn the slip over (she had retrieved it blank side up) and read her doom.

"You are requested to call at the superintendent's private office Monday, twelve forty-five," was neatly typewritten precisely in the middle of the paper.

Win did not know whether to be relieved or alarmed.

"I'll ask Sadie what she thinks," was her quick decision. But Sadie was not available this evening. An "old chum" had asked Miss Kirk out to supper, and Miss Child having snubbed her faithful lion man for reasons which had appeared good at the time, had no one to give her the key to those dozen mystic words which might as well have been written in cipher.

"And even Sadie can't tell for certain," she reflected. "I can't possibly know till Monday noon."

All the fatigue and nerve strain of six dreadful days and six appalling nights seemed suddenly to culminate in a fit of overpowering restlessness. Worn out though she was (or all the more because of that, perhaps) she could not go "home" to Columbus Avenue, where the "L" that Sadie said should be spelled with an "H" ran past her window.

She was sure if she sat down or went to bed she should think more about her aching back and burning feet than if she walked. She longed for the sweet, kind air of heaven to ripple past her hot cheeks like cool water. She longed for stars to look up to, and for the purple peace and silence of night after the clamour of the store and before the babel of Columbus Avenue, into which presently she must plunge.

"I'll walk in the park," she proposed to herself. "It will do me good. When I'm too tired, I can rest for a few minutes on one of the seats and hear myself think."

That was one of the many disadvantages of "home." There you could hear at the same time almost every other sound which could be produced in the world, but you could not hear yourself think.

Earl Usher was not to be seen as she came out into the street, and Win was glad. Once or twice to-day she had half repented the snub which, perhaps, he had not meant to deserve, but now she thanked it for his absence. Swiftly she walked away, though still with the just perceptible limp that most shop girls have in their first few weeks of "business."

She did not look up at the giant Hands with their blazing rings, as she had looked at first, half admiring, half awed. Their gesture now seemed greedy. They were trying to "grab the whole sky," as the lion tamer said. Rather would one hurry to escape from under them, and go where the Hands of Peter Rolls could not reach.

It was exquisite in the park, and she was thinking how a delicate, floating blue curtain appeared to shut her away for a little while from all the harshness of life, when a small and singularly silent automobile glided by. A lamp showed her the forms of two men in the open car, one in front, who drove, and one behind, who sat with arms folded.

"How heavenly to have the air and lean back restfully without needing to walk," thought tired Win.

She was envying the comfortable figure with its arms folded when the little car turned and, to her astonishment, drew up close beside her. Involuntarily she stopped; then, as one of the men jumped out, she regained her presence of mind and walked on at top speed.

The man strode along after her, however, and spoke.

"Don't you remember me? That's very unkind. You might wait a minute, anyhow, and let me remind you where we met. I recognized you as I went by, that's why I came back."

Wondering if it could be possible that they had met, Win ventured a glance at the face on a level with her own. She knew instantly that never had she seen it before.

"You're mistaken," she said. "I don't know you. Please go."

"Logan is my name," he persisted. "Jim Logan. Now don't you remember? But you didn't tell me your name that other time."

Win took longer steps. This active hint did not, however trouble Mr. Logan. He was an inch or so taller than she, perhaps, and kept step with the utmost ease.

"You and I might have been at the same dancing school," said he. "I'm doing the newest stunt—the wango. Is that what you're doing, too? Or is it the y-lang-y-lango? I could go on like this all night! I hope you're not engaged to anybody else for the next dance?"

"As a matter of fact, I am," said Win sharply, though it was all she could do not to laugh. "My partner will very much object to you."

"That's all right. It's not likely he knows jiu-jitsu as well as I do," cheerfully replied the man, still hurrying on at the same pace. He kept half a step in advance of the girl, as if to be prepared in case she should begin to run; and thus, without seeming to look, Win could see him in profile.

He was so smartly dressed that, in England, he would have been called a "nut." What was the American equivalent for a nut, she did not know. He had a hawk-nosed profile which might have been effective had not his undercut jaw stuck out aggressively, suggesting extreme, hectoring obstinacy, even cruelty.

She had time to see that his hair was an uninteresting brown, and his skin the ordinary sallow skin of the man about town. But suddenly he took her unawares, turning to face her with disquieting abruptness. She caught an impression of eyes sparkling in the lamplight; small and set close on either side of a high-bridged, narrow nose, yet bright and boldly smiling. His voice was that of an educated person and not disagreeable in tone, but Win was anxious to escape hearing it again.

He seemed to wait for an answer, and when it did not come, he went on:

"You ought to go in for an Olympic race. You're all for them in England. I'm out of training, but I can stand this as long as you can, I bet. The only thing is, I wanted to take you for a run in my auto, it's such a nice, crisp night. I'll drive you home, if you say the word."

"The thing wished for comes when your hands are tied," says the Turkish proverb. Win had been yearning for a spin. She kept silence and sped on, wondering whether she could surprise the enemy by executing a sudden right-about-face.

"Have you been in this country long?" he inquired.

No answer.

"Oh, indeed, is that so? I thought you hadn't! Are you living in New York at present? Don't be afraid to tell me. Even if you are, that won't drive me out of the little old burg. See here, you're mighty restless. And you do hate to part with much of your conversation at one time, don't you? You're a peach, all right, but a spiced peach preserved in vinegar."

Winifred wheeled and began walking east even faster than she had been walking west. In the distance a tall—a very tall—figure was approaching, like a ship under full sail. Could it be—- Yes, it was! Bless the light of the lamp that showed him! Now indeed she dared to laugh.

"Here comes that partner of mine at last!" she exclaimed and almost ran to met the lion tamer.

"Good Lord! Very well, I can't hope to compete against cigar signs," replied Mr. Logan. "I was unprepared for Goliath. Little David will fade away till he gets his sling. You make me forget my name and telephone number, but this is where I get off at. Please remember me next time."

"I will, when next time comes!" Win was tempted to toss after him impudently as, lifting his cap, the motorist took a hasty short cut to the motor. Win was actually laughing when Earl Usher joined her. She felt safe, and not even tired. The little adventure had had its uses, after all! It had been, she thought, just as beneficial and not nearly so expensive as a tonic or a Turkish bath.

"Was that mutt a gentleman friend of yours, kid, or was he some fresh guy? 'Cause, if he was playing the fool, I'll break into the game and go for his blood," remarked the rescuer.

"It was a Mr. Logan," replied Win hurriedly, making up her mind that she must avoid any chance of trouble. "But—but I don't like him much," she added. "I was very glad when I saw you. And I'm not going to scold you for following me, because I know you meant well—and, as it happened, it's ending well. For a reward, I forgive you everything. And I've just thought of a new name for you, Mr. Usher."

"Hope it's some better than Sadie Kirk's."

"What—Teddy Bear? Yes, it's better than that. Did you ever read 'Quo Vadis?'"

"Not on your life. Sounds like a patent medicine."

"It's a novel. And in it a great, good giant of a young man devotes himself to rescuing a maiden named Lygia. His name was Ursus, and he was so strong he could bring a bull to its knees—-"

"Why, you silly little kid, that's a movie, not a novel. I've seen Ursus and his bull, all right. You're makin' me stuck on myself. I feel as if I was it."

"Well, you are it. I christen you Ursus. And thank you very much for taking so much trouble about me."

"I didn't take trouble," protested Ursus, half afraid that he was being "kidded." "All I did was to beat it after you at what the swell reporters call a respectful distance just to see you safe home if you meant to hoof it. When you shot into the park, thinks I, 'maybe she's made a date to chat with a gentleman friend, so I'll hang back.' But—-"

"It was quite an accident, meeting Mr. Logan, I assure you, Ursus," said Win, still unwilling to confide in him the details of the late encounter, which seemed ridiculous now it was over. "I wanted a breath of air. I've had it, and if you'll be very good and never use such a word again as you did night before last, you may walk home with me if you like."

"What word do you refer to? Cutie?"

"Yes. And another still more offensive."

"Sweetie?"

"Yes. Disgusting! 'Kid's' bad enough. But I thought you mightn't know any better. I draw the line at the others."

"All right," said Ursus rather sulkily, sure that he was being made fun of now. "But when a chap's a girl's friend what is he to call her?"

"'You' will do very well, if 'Miss Child' is beyond your vocabulary."

"I don't call that bein' friends. Say, is that your mutt's automobile sort of following along in our wake?"

"I don't know, for I don't want to look back," said Win. (They were out of the park by this time.) "But—I've changed my mind about walking all the way. Let's hurry and take a Fifty-Ninth Street car!"

* * * * *

By day, in the shop, Win could laugh when she thought of the Columbus Avenue house where she and Sadie "hung out." But at night, in her room, trying desperately to sleep, she could not even smile. To do so, with all those noises fraying the edges of her brain, would be to gibber!

In that neighbourhood front rooms were cheaper than rooms at the back. Lodgers who could afford to do so paid extra money for a little extra tranquillity. Neither Sadie Kirk nor Winifred Child was of these aristocrats. Their landlady had thriftily hired two cheap flats in a fair-sized house whose ground floor was occupied by a bakery, and whose fire-escapes gave it the look of a big body wearing its skeleton outside. She "rented" her rooms separately, and made money on the transaction, though she could afford to take low prices.

In the street below the narrow windows surface cars whirred to and fro and clanged their bells. In front of the windows, and strangely, terribly near to the six-inch-wide balconies, furnished with withered rubber plants, roared the "L" trains, jointed, many-eyed dragons chasing each other so fast that there seemed to be no pause between at any hour of the day or during most hours of the night. Private life behind those windows was impossible unless you kept your blinds down. If you forgot, or said wildly to yourself that you didn't care, that you must breathe and see your own complexion by daylight at any cost, thousands of faces, one after the other, stared into yours. You could almost touch them, and it was little or no consolation to reflect when they had seen you brushing your hair or fastening your blouse, that these travellers in trains would never hear your name or know who you were.

As for a bath—but then the great, magnificent advantage of living at Mrs. McFarrell's was the bathroom. It was dark and small and smelled of the black beetles who lived happily around the hot-water pipes. You were not expected to take more than one bath a week, and for that one bath towel was provided free.

"Oh, I thought you'd had your bath this week!" was the answer Win got on her second night, when mildly asking for a towel which had disappeared. But if you were silly enough to pay thirty cents extra for putting water on your body every day, you could do so. And, anyhow a bathroom was a splendid advertisement. One lodger told another: "The use of the bathroom is thrown in."

That night, when Win had bathed and laid herself carefully down in the narrow bed which shook and groaned as if suffering from palsy, it seemed more impossible than ever to go to sleep. Each new train that rumbled by was a giant, homing bee, her brain the hive for which it aimed. Her hot head was crowded with thoughts, disturbing, fighting, struggling thoughts, yet the giant bee pushed the throng ruthlessly aside and darted in. Each time it seemed impossible to bear it again. She felt as if she had caterpillars in her spine and ants on her nerves.

Win thought about the superintendent, Mr. Meggison, and wondered again and again whether she would be discharged or whether he had merely "taken a fancy" to her looks and wished to see if she were flirtatiously inclined. She knew now, from Sadie, that Meggison's desire was to be a "gay dog," though his courage did not always march with his ambition.

The red-haired girl, Sadie supposed, had perhaps come to the Hands armed with an introduction from some "lady friend." This theory would account for Meggison's mysterious murmur of, "That's different." What should she—Win—do if Father invited her to dine with him, as it seemed he did invite some of the girls? Sadie said that if such a thing happened to her she would accept, because she wasn't afraid of Father. She "could scare him more than he could scare her," and an extra hand might "get the push" if she refused a civil invitation.

With Mr. Croft, "Saint Peter's Understudy," it was more dangerous. You had to beware of him. If you were a "looker," like Win, the best thing that could happen to you was never to come within eyeshot of Henry Croft. He lived in the suburbs, was married, and the superintendent of a Sunday school. His name was on all the charity lists. He was so tall and thin and sprawling that he looked like a human hatrack, and his solemn circle of a face, surrounded with yellowish whiskers, had a sunflower effect. He had written a book, "Week-Day Sermons by a Layman"; nevertheless, he was a terror.

There were, according to Sadie, girls in the store who were of no more use as saleswomen than baby alligators would have been, but they "gave the glad eye" to Mr. Croft, and accepted his flowers and invitations for moonlight motor rides. Nearly every one knew, but nobody told.

What use? Who was there to tell? Croft was "up at the top and then some." Only Saint Peter himself stood above. And who would dare complain to Saint Peter about his respectable right hand? Even if there were any chance of getting near P.R., which there wasn't. He came mostly at night, as if it were a disgrace to show himself in a shop, even if it was his own. If ever he did any "prowling" in business hours, it was with the understudy glued to his side.

As for "sweating" and "grinding" there wasn't a cent's worth of difference between Croft and Meggison, said Sadie. Nevertheless, Win was feeling thankful, as the "L" train bees boomed through her brain, that at worst it was Mr. Meggison who had mysteriously summoned her, not Mr. Croft.

If only she could go to sleep and forget them both, and the trains and the cars and the man in the park and Miss Stein, who still had against her a "grouch." If only she could forget even big, blundering Ursus, who wanted to treat her to oyster stews that he couldn't afford and take her to a dance hall next Sunday! And Sadie, too, who knew such strange and awful things about the world and life, although she was so good.

But no. Impossible to stop thinking, impossible to forget, impossible to sleep. All New York seemed to be about her ears. She could hear the frantic rush of everything which true New Yorkers love, and she could feel its sky-scrapers closing in around her like an unclimbable wall. As she thought of the great, noisy city she saw it consisting entirely of vastly high towers, with inhabitants who spent their time in tearing about—people who looked at her in the street as if she were not there, or, if she was, they would rather she were somewhere else.

She dared not picture the ship sailing for England nearly every day of the week. If she were free to do what she liked—or almost what she liked—she would go at least as often as every Saturday to watch a big liner move out from the dock, just for the delicious torture of it.

And yet—did she want to go back home? Whenever she asked herself this question—and it was often—invariably for some silly reason, she saw the blue, wistful eyes of that hypocrite, the younger Peter Rolls. Also there came upon her a choking sense of homelessness, a mother-want in a lonely world. But, as Sadie Kirk agreed with her in saying, "What was the good of squeezing juice out of your eyes just because you happened to be low in your mind?" No, she would not cry!

Then, after all, she dropped asleep in a minute's interval between trains, and dreamed that she was lost in Fifty-Ninth Street. It was as long as the way to England, and a ghastly street to be lost in. Its sky line—if it knew anything about the sky—was as irregular as a Wagner dragon's teeth—high buildings and low buildings, and shanties where coloured families lived; little, sinister-looking houses where people could be murdered and their bodies never found, shops where you could buy everything you didn't want and nothing that you did.

In the dream black and white children were fighting and skating on roller skates over the pavement. Cars were clanging bells. Everybody and everything was making a noise of some sort. Win was trying to get past the skaters and catch a car. She must, or she would be late for something! But what? This was horrible. She was going somewhere, and could not remember where or what she had to do. She was lost forever, and had forgotten her name and the name of the street where she lived. A roller-skating boy with the face of a black monkey threw her down, and a surface car and Peter Rolls's automobile were about to run over her when she waked with a jump that shook the palsied bed. Another "L" train booming by!

Despite lack of sleep and a tiredness of body that Sunday could not cure, Win had never looked more attractive than when, at precisely twelve forty-five on Monday afternoon she presented herself at Mr. Meggison's door.

This was his private den, and a visit there, even on a less alarming errand than hers, was far more formidable than pausing for inspection at an office window. Sadie, with the best intentions, had been able to give little encouragement There must be scolding or else flirting in prospect. And Winifred's eyes were bright, her cheeks pink, her head high, as the superintendent's voice bade her "Come in."



CHAPTER XIV

FROM SCYLLA TO CHARYBDIS

She went in. Mr. Meggison sat in front of his roll-top desk. No such world-shaking event as his rising to receive her took place. His stenographer's chair was vacant. The cherubic aspect had for the moment dominated Mephistopheles. Mr. Meggison was smiling. But Win did not know whether to fear the smile or to thank her stars for it.

Little girls—and sometimes big ones—should be seen and not heard, so Win waited in meek, flushed silence for the great man to speak.

"Shut the door, please, Miss—er—Miss Child," said he. And the cherubic eyes gazing from under the fierce contradiction of heavy eyebrows up to the tall girl's face conveyed to her mind that "please" was a tribute. Also, she suddenly knew that the superintendent had hesitated over her name on purpose. A man in a high position may wish to be agreeable to a girl beneath him, at the same time informing her that she is of no vast importance.

With a certain stiff young dignity Win shut the office door.

"You may as well sit down. I want to talk to you."

She sat down in the chair of Mr. Meggison's absent stenographer. By this time the pink of her cheeks had deepened to red. She was wondering more than ever what he was going to do, and what she would do when he had done it. But as she sat facing him she realized that she was no longer afraid. She felt a sense of power and resource.

"Are you surprised that I remember your name, Miss Child?" he asked.

"I don't know the custom," she replied primly. Would he expect her to say "Sir?" Anyhow, she wouldn't! She compromised with a dainty meekness which might be interpreted as respect for a superior. Mr. Meggison fixed her with a sharp look which would have detected the impudence of a lurking laugh.

"That's a funny answer," said he. "You 'don't know the custom!' Well, my idea of you is, you don't know much about any business customs, on our side of the water or yours either." As he spoke he watched her face to catch any guilty flicker of an eyelid. "I want you to tell me what was your idea in going for a job with us."

"I saw your advertisement for extra hands."

"The woods—I mean the papers—are full of advertisements. What made you pick out ours?"

"I'd tried to get other things and failed."

"So we were a last resort, eh?"

"I thought first of being a governess or a companion or getting into a public library or—things of that sort."

"Why not the stage? You're a good-looking girl, with a figure."

"I promised my father I wouldn't go on the stage. But, anyhow, I don't suppose I could have got on—an amateur like me. Every place in New York seems full up. And I have no training of any sort."

"Just a young lady, eh?"

Win smiled. "I never thought of it as a profession—or a label."

He looked slightly puzzled, and when Mr. Meggison was puzzled by an employee, he was generally annoyed. This case seemed, however, to be an exception. He kept his temper, and even condescended to grin.

"I don't want you should think I'm asking all these questions because we have any fault to find with you," he said. "You've done very well. I always know what's going on all over the place. I keep track of everything in every department. I wouldn't be where I am if I wasn't up to that. I called you here partly to compliment you on your smartness in that little stunt of the first day. And you've gone on all right since, all right. These things don't get lost in the wash. But before I come to that I'm bound to tell you that the report's come up to me you're a spy."

He threw the cap at her in a way to make her jump if it fitted. But Win did not flinch. What she had overheard on the first day saved her now from a shock of surprise.

"I caught that word about me from one of the girls," she admitted frankly. "I wondered what made her think me a spy, and I'm wondering still."

"I guess she thought you looked a sort of swell, and any one could see you weren't used to work."

"But—there must be lots of girls like me in your big shops, just as there are at home."

"No, that's where you're mistaken, Miss Child. There's more chances with us for women than with you, and more places for 'em. We don't get many of your class in the stores. They can do better for themselves. You, being a stranger, though, had no pull. And maybe you haven't been over here long."

"I haven't been long. But my money ran short," smiled Win, encouraged now, since neither of Sadie's prognostications seemed likely to be fulfilled. "Still, I don't see why it should occur to anybody that I was a spy. What would a spy do in a shop?"

"That depends whether the job came from outside or in."

"I don't understand!"

"Well, there's a set of smart Alecks who've banded together and call themselves the Anti-Sweat League, or Work People's Aid Society, or any old name like that. They smell around to see what goes on behind the scenes in a department store, and drop on us if they can."

"Oh, I see! And you thought they might have hired me—-"

"I didn't think so, as a matter of fact. I pride myself on spotting folks for what they are the minute I lamp them. There's something about 'em I can feel. I was sure you weren't one of that bunch. But I felt bound to mention the report. Now that's finished—breakfast cleared away! We'll go on to the next thing."

Again Win waited. And her heart missed a beat, for Mr. Meggison was looking at her as if he had something very special to say.

"Most of the extra people we let go the week after Christmas," he went on slowly. "Even if they're smart, we have enough regular ones without 'em. But perhaps we can keep you if you make good. And if you want to stay. Do you?"

"Yes, thank you. As far as I can tell now, I should like to stay, if I give satisfaction," Win answered with caution.

"Well, we'll see. It's up to you, anyhow. I told you I was going to test your character. That's why I put you where I did. I knew what you'd be up against. Now the idea is to test you some more."

He paused an instant. This was a catch phrase of his: "the idea is." He often used it. And when he said: "It is my habit," or "My way is," he spoke with the repressed yet bursting pride of the self-made man who has suddenly been raised to a height almost beyond his early dreams.

"I may change you into another department next week," he went on, "where you'll have a better time and less work. What do you say to Gloves?"

Win felt very stupid. "What ought I to say to Gloves?" she inquired helplessly.

Then the great Mr. Meggison actually laughed. "Gee! You are an amateur, Miss Child. Why, the girls all think the Gloves are the pick of the basket. What your London Gaiety is to actresses, that the glove department is to our salesladies. It's called the marriage market. Ladies' and gents' gloves, you understand. Now do you see the point?"

"I suppose I do," Win rather reluctantly confessed, faintly blushing.

"Some of the best lookers in our Gloves have married Fifth Avenue swells. It's pretty busy there just now. The young fellows buy gloves by the dozen for their best girls at Christmas time when they want to ring a change on flowers. Maybe I'll put you into Gloves, if you'll agree to make yourself useful."

"I'll try to do my best wherever you put me, Mr. Meggison" said Win, sounding to herself like a heroine of a Sunday serial, and feeling not unlike one in a difficult situation at the end of an instalment. At home, in her father's house, she had occasionally been driven to read Sunday serials on Sunday. They were the only fiction permitted on that day.

"That's all right. But now I mean something in particular" explained Meggison. "I told you what they were saying about you in your department to see how you'd take it. Well, you didn't seem desperately shocked at the idea of being engaged by a so-called charitable society to watch out for any breaks we might make. Not that we do make any, so your trouble would have been wasted. We give our girls seats and every living thing the law asks for, and our men make no complaints that we hear. But, of course, we ain't omnipotent. Things are said, things happen we don't get onto, little tricks that cost us money. Folks shirking, and even stealing; we have to keep a sharp lookout. We can't turn the spotlights on to everybody at once. So when we come across a pair of lamps that are bright, a long way above the average we sometimes make it worth their while—-"

"Oh, Mr. Meggison, please don't go on!" Win cut the great man short. "I'd rather you didn't say it, because—I don't wish to hear. I—I don't want to know what you mean."

It was his turn to flush. But the change of colour was only just perceptible. He had himself under almost perfect control. His eyes sent out a flash, then became dull and expressionless as blue-gray marbles. He was silent and watchful. Win, after her outburst, was breathlessly speechless.

"Good!" said he at last. "Very good. That's the second test. And it's all right, like the first. Now do you understand?"

"I—I'm not sure. I—-"

"You just said you didn't want to know what I meant. But I want you to know. I was testing your character again. I'm sure now you're straight. You're a good girl, as well as a smart one, Miss Child."

Suddenly, just as she had begun to feel so relieved that tears were on the way to her eyes, Meggison bent forward with an abrupt movement and laid his hot, plump hand heavily on hers. Up jumped the girl and down fell the hand. She seemed to hear herself excusing herself and explaining her rashness to Sadie: "I couldn't stand it. I wouldn't! I didn't care what happened."

"What's the matter?" he asked, blustering, his face now very red. He kept his seat and looked up at her with a bullish stare.

"Nothing is the matter, Mr. Meggison," she said. "Only I think I've troubled you long enough. You—will be wanting me to go."

As she spoke she gazed straight and steadily down into his eyes, as if he were an animal that could be mastered if your look never let his go. She remembered how Sadie had said that Meggison wanted to be a "dog," but his bark might be stopped if you showed him in time that you were not afraid. Winifred was afraid, but she acted as if she were not, which was the great thing. And the "stunt," as Sadie would have called it, seemed to work—if only for the moment.

When his face had cooled, he said: "Yes, you can go, Miss Child. I've nothing more to say to you—at present. Except this: it won't be the Gloves."

* * * * *

Tingling, burning, whirling with the excitement of her interview—fully felt only after it was over—Win started to hurry back to work. It was not a crowded time of the day in the shopping world. Many ladies were lunching not buying, and employees, if on business, were permitted to use the elevators, white light going up, red light down. Only the boy in smart shop livery, who rushed the lift from roof to basement, was in the mirrored vehicle when Win got in at the superintendent's floor.

"Hats, Children's Wardrobes, Games, Toys, Books, Stationery!" shouted the strident young voice mechanically as the doors whizzed back in their groove at the story below.

In streamed some jaded mothers and children, for whom Win backed humbly into a corner, and then, just as the doors were about to snap shut once more for a downward plunge, a young man and woman hurried laughing in. Winifred Child shrank farther into her corner, plastering herself against the wall of the elevator, and turning her face away, for the newcomers were Lord Raygan and Ena Rolls.

As the wall consisted entirely of mirrors, however, turning away gave little protection. The mothers, refusing to retire with their young before the latest arrivals, "swell" though they might be, Miss Rolls and her companion were forced to push past the forms which kept the door, and by the time the elevator had shot down a story or two farther the pair were close to Win. Still she kept her face twisted as far over her shoulder as it would go, at risk of getting a cramp in the neck, and her heart was beating with such loud thuds under the respectable black blouse that she feared lest they should hear it.

"Why, hello—it's the Lady in the Moon!" exclaimed Lord Raygan gayly, just when Win had begun to hope she might reach the ground-floor level without being discovered.

Involuntarily Ena turned with a slight start, recognized Win, pretended not to, and presented the back instead of the side of a wonderful hat. An aigret jabbed viciously at the tall shop-girl's eye, and Miss Rolls said hastily: "What Lady in the Moon? I don't know whom you're talking about, Lord Raygan. But oh, here's our floor! This is where I want to get out."

"Never mind, let's stop in and come up again," commanded Raygan in the masterful way which Ena loved for its British male brutality—when it didn't interfere with her wishes. "It's Miss—oh, you know, from the Monarchic. Don't you remember her in the moon dress? How do you do, Miss—er—er? Who would have thought of meeting you here?"

They were crowded almost as closely together in the lift as sardines in a box, and it was impossible not to answer.

"How do you do?" responded Win desperately, and Miss Rolls, making the best of a bad dilemma, found it obligatory to recognize Miss Child. If she had not done so Lord Raygan would have thought her snobbish, though it was not entirely from snobbishness that she had wished to escape the girl of the Monarchic.

Her heart was beating almost as hard as Win's. Her brother Peter and Lady Eileen were somewhere in the shop. This was the day chosen for the sightseeing expedition insisted upon by Raygan. Ena had hated the idea of it, hated having to be associated in Raygan's eyes with the Hands. She had felt a presentiment that something horrid would happen, but she hadn't supposed it would be quite so horrid and upsetting as this.

A dozen times Petro had asked if she'd ever heard from Miss Child. Only day before yesterday—the silly fellow never seemed to forget! And any moment now he and Eileen might come. They had made a rendezvous at the jewellery department, not far from this row of elevators, on the ground floor. Hang the girl! How little delicacy she had shown in taking a place in Peter Rolls's father's store after that conversation on the ship! And how was she to be got rid of in a desperate hurry without making Lord Raygan cross?



CHAPTER XV

THE LADY IN THE MOON

It was a difficult situation for Miss Rolls. Dimly it had dawned upon her more than once that Rags regarded certain speeches and ways of hers as "snobbish"—speeches and ways which to her had seemed aristocratic. Neither Rags nor Eileen nor Lady Raygan had ever so much as mentioned the word "snob" in connection with any member of the Rolls family or their friends. But they had lightly let it drop in connection with others, and Ena's extreme sensitiveness on the subject her extreme desire to be everything that Raygan liked, made her quick to put two and two together.

She began to see that many of her favourite tricks at home and abroad—with servants, with her parents, with acquaintances, and the public in general—were not proofs, in Raygan's eyes, that she was to the manor born, rather the contrary, and that hurt. She was straining to understand and observe the finest nuances. Never had it been more difficult than to-day, during this visit she detested to the great department store of Peter Rolls. If she had declined to come, that would have been snobbish. If, having come, she refused the "glad hand" to one of her father's shop girls whom Raygan chose to greet as an equal—that, too, would be snobbish. And to be snobbish was, in Raygan's language, to be "beastly vulgar."

If she were not snobbish—if she treated Miss Child with warm cordiality, asked her a dozen questions, and listened kindly to the answers, Petro would come with Eileen and find his long-lost friend. Would Lord Raygan go so far in his dislike of snobbishness as to welcome an assistant culled from his bride's father's shop as a sister-in-law? Ena thought not. Besides, she was not sure yet that she would ever be his bride, and any risk she took might turn the scale against her, so uncertain seemed the balance. Just at present the danger was that she might fall in the slippery space between two high stools.

"Why, yes, of course, Lord Raygan," she said, able in the midst of alarums to enjoy the repetition of his title, which made people stare. "We'll stay in the elevator and talk to Miss Child, and go up again when she has gone. Are you really working here in the store, Miss Child, as—as—a—-"

"Yes, I'm in the blouse department," Win replied, quite as anxious to escape as Miss Rolls was anxious to blot her out. "I've been up to see the superintendent on business, and now I'm hurrying back to work."

"You never wrote me," said Ena, thinking it was better to chatter than let Lord Raygan talk, perhaps indiscreetly. And there were still more floors at which the elevator must stop before reaching the ground level. "I—I do trust you would have written if you'd wanted anything done that I could do." Her tone tried not to be too patronizing, lest patronage should be considered to verge on snobbishness.

"Thank you. I never did want anything that you could do. Though it was kind of you to offer," Win returned, and was aware that every one was listening.

Oh, why had she believed Mr. Loewenfeld when he vowed that the one secure sanctuary against the Rolls family was in Peter Rolls's store? If only she had not come here; by this time surely she would have found something else and all would have been well.

"Well, it's very nice to see you again, Lady in the Moon," said Raygan. "Do you like this place better than Nadine's?"

"There's more variety," replied Win.

"Not homesick yet for our side of the water—what?"

"I haven't time to think about it," she fibbed. "Now I must say good-bye. We're coming to the ground floor."

"Let's go along with her, Miss Rolls, and see her home," suggested Rags. "I want to know whether the blouse department beats that Monarchic room with all the mirrors—what?"

Ena's face showed distress. Her eyes actually appealed to the cause of it to save her, and Win was only too ready to respond.

"Please don't come," she protested earnestly. "It wouldn't do. It's against the rules to talk to—to any one you know, except on business. I'm new here still, and I'm sure you wouldn't want to get me into trouble. I'd much rather go alone, though it's very nice of you to offer. Good-bye!"

The lift had at last reached the ground floor, and all Win had to do was to let herself be borne out on a warm tide of females. Ena pressed her body against the wall, and Lord Raygan must, perforce, stand by her.

"Good-bye!" she cried. "We have to go up again, you know."

"We'll sail by, anyhow, and see where you hang out later," Raygan called after the disappearing form in black. "And we'll bring Rolls and my sister."

By this time the elevator had emptied itself, save for those bound for the basement and Ena and Rags. It was impossible for Win to forbid the party to "sail by," or to make any answer at all, over the decorated heads of many women. But she felt as if she would rather die than have Peter Rolls see her working in his father's store. He might easily think that she had taken a place there because of knowing him, and that, regretting the snub delivered at parting, she had hoped he might some day find her in the Hands.

"I just can't bear it," she said to herself. "I'll have to pretend to be ill, and get permission from Mr. Thorpe to leave the floor again—to go to the hospital room—anything to get away."

But—wouldn't that be like the ostrich hiding its head in the sand? Evidently Lord Raygan and Lady Eileen were being shown things. If they hadn't been there already they would be sure to take a peep into the hospital as well as the rest room. Not the restaurant perhaps! If Mr. Rolls junior and his sister had any idea what that was like, they would avoid it with their distinguished guests. Still, even there one would not be safe. The only sure escape would be to go home, and she would have to look very ill indeed before she could obtain leave of absence for the rest of the day.

Wondering what on earth was to be done, Win suddenly recalled the look in Ena Rolls's eyes, which had said as plainly as spoken words: "For heaven's sake get me out of this scrape, and do or say something to put Lord Raygan off dragging me with him to your horrid old blouse department."

"She won't let them come!" Win told herself. "Somehow she'll prevent it. I'll stick to my guns."

So she went back to her place as if nothing had happened and returned to Mr. Thorpe the permit he, as aisle manager, had given her to leave her duties and go off the floor on which they were carried out. It was a small paper slip signed by him, and Thorpe would have been responsible had she outstayed the time asked for. But she was safely within it, and she had herself well enough in hand, after her adventure, to answer his kind, sad smile with gratitude.

"What will Miss Rolls do to stop Lord Raygan from wanting to come—and from saying anything about me to the others?" she wondered. She could not guess. Yet she grew more and more confident of Ena's finesse as the long afternoon wore on.

What Miss Rolls did was very simple, if you had the clue. But the clue was what Win lacked.

"I thought we were due to meet Eily and Rolls about this time, and look at those wonderful pearls your father says he gets straight from the fisheries," Rags reminded Ena when the elevator dropped to the basement and began to bound up again.

"So we are," she admitted, "but there's something I must tell you before we see Petro. That's why I made the excuse about getting out—only, of course, you didn't understand. You couldn't! Any floor will do, really—but we'll think of the one likely to be the least crowded. I can't explain if creatures are pushing us about. Oh, 'Upholstery and Furniture!' They'll do."

The two wormed their way out of the lift, which was becoming more congested at each stopping place, the legitimate hour for luncheon now being over. The floor chosen by Ena had a series of "Ideal Rooms," furnished according to periods, and she led Raygan into a Dutch dining-room with a high-backed settle which, if they sat down upon it, would screen them from passers-by outside the open, welcoming door. Besides, the old oak made a becoming background for a blue velvet dress and silvery ermine stole.

"It's about that girl I want to speak," she said, when she had enticed Lord Raygan into this secluded retreat.

"Who, the Lady in the Moon?" He was staring at delft plates on panelled walls.

"Yes. I wished for a minute she'd been the Lady in Jericho. Perhaps you noticed that I didn't seem overwhelmed with joy at sight of her?"

"Well, it did occur to me that you might have been more enthusiastic if she'd been a Miss Vanderbilt."

"It wasn't that at all," Ena assured him eagerly, almost piteously. "I didn't mind having to speak to her because she's a shop girl, but because I was afraid if we stopped and talked, my brother might come along. I wouldn't have had that happen for anything."

"Why on earth not?"

"I can't tell you, Lord Raygan. Please don't ask me. You'll embarrass me very much if you do. But will you just trust me that it would be a very bad thing if they were to meet, and not insist on our going to look her up at the waist counter or wherever she is?"

"Certainly I won't insist," said Rags. "I don't care, you know, whether we look her up or not. Only she was Rolls's chum on the Monarchic, and I thought if he—-"

"Dear Lord Raygan, please don't think about it any more. And if you want to be very kind, and make me real happy and comfortable, don't tell Petro we met the girl—or even mention her. You will promise not, won't you?"

"Of course, if you ask me, that's enough," said Rags, looking rather sulky. He was curious to know what she actually meant, but, of course, could not ask, and somehow the whole affair—Ena's deep solemnity and secrecy, her hints which mustn't be questioned, began to seem silly and even rather repulsive. He had never liked her less.

Vaguely conscious that she was not "making a hit," and more than ever angry with the hateful necessity for this excursion, which was to blame for everything, Ena rambled on, "hoping he wouldn't misunderstand," and floundering into half explanations which made the situation less comfortable every minute. At last, when the subject was torn to tatters, and Raygan had begun to betray impatience, she got up to go.

"Petro and Lady Eileen will be waiting for us in the jewellery department now, I expect," Ena said drearily. "Let's hurry and meet them, and then we can get away. I'm bored to death with the stuffy old place, and you must be, too. I can't bear anything commercial. If there's a lovely concert or a tango tea somewhere to finish up the afternoon, it will be nice. Or almost anything!"

There was a tango tea, and it was nice. Rags, however was far from nice. He did not seem at all himself.

"I'm afraid the poor old store wasn't as much fun as you thought it would be," said Petro, half apologetically, when he began to realize that Rags had a "grouch." Petro had liked the plan to visit the Hands, and had liked the visit, too. The place had seemed a beehive of industry and the bees—selling bees and buying bees—had all looked happy and prosperous enough. On the surface, dad's methods appeared to be the right methods. But Peter wondered if it would be a betrayal of his promise if he wandered through the store alone sometimes, when it was less crowded and things more normal. He had surrendered his conviction that he "ought to help," and as Peter senior had stipulated for no interference if Peter junior truly trusted him, one must be careful about interpretations.

Petro's ideas for a "Start in Life Fund" were occupying a great deal of his attention and were crystallizing into concrete form. He hoped that he might soon cease to be a drone, and end by being of some real use in the world. But as Peter junior passed out of the shop, his promise to keep "hands off the Hands" seemed one of the things to regret, whether selfishly or otherwise. He would have liked to know more of the place, so passionately interesting to him, apart from its business side; and he was unable to understand how Raygan, the one whose curiosity had drawn all four to the Hands that day, could have managed to be bored.

"Blouses" pulsed with excitement. Miss Ena Rolls and her brother were said to be "showing their father's shop to an English lord." How the thrilling tale began to go the rounds nobody in "Blouses" could tell. But whenever any famous personage—a millionaire's daughter or an actress, a society beauty or the heroine of a fashionable scandal—enters a big department store, the news of her advent runs from counter to counter like wildfire. In some shops the appearance of an Astor, a Vanderbilt, or a Princess Patricia would send up the mercury of excitement forty degrees higher than that of a Miss or Mr. Rolls. But at the Hands, Peter the Great's son and daughter would have drawn all eyes from the reigning Czar and Czarina of Russia.

It was rumoured that they had lunched early in the Pompeian restaurant. The waitress who had served them had not known until too late. She would regret this all her life. Mr. Michaels, of "Jewellery," who had been honoured by showing them pearls, was envied by all his fellows, and the same with Miss Dick, of "Candy," and Miss Wallace, in "Perfume." Girls in all departments grew quite jumpy in expectation that the party might appear, and under the intense nervous strain of trying to recognize them in time.

"Rubberneck!" one hissed to another, and giggled if she made her start.

Even Miss Stein, now somewhat resigned to fate and looking more kindly at Fred Thorpe, became condescending and communicative in the general flurry.

"Keep your eyes peeled for a good-looking, short guyl in blue velvet, with an ermine muff and stole that's a beaut from Beautville," she said to Win. "Thorpe saw her. He's had her pointed out to him at the theayter, so he knows. Her brother's dark and thin, but blue eyed. I saw in the Sunday supplement he's goin' to marry the sister of that lord."

* * * * *

There was a dinner at Sea Gull Manor that night in honour of the Rolls's guests, and just as Eileen had finished dressing, her brother Raygan knocked at her door.

"Want me to say your tie's all right?" she chirped.

"No, my child, I do not," said Rags. "I wouldn't trust your taste round the corner with a tie. You're looking rather pleased with yourself—what?"

"I'm pleased with myself and everybody else," replied Eileen. "This is one of my happy nights."

"I wonder why? There's sure to be a dull crowd at dinner. I've found out now the Rollses know all the wrong lot."

"I found that out long ago. But I don't care. And I'm going to sit by Petro. So I shall be all right."

"You've jolly well been with him the whole blessed day. Aren't you sick of his society yet?"

"No. And I shouldn't be till doomsday. He talks to me of such interesting things."

"Has he ever by chance said anything to you about the Lady in the Moon?"

"Good gracious! no, nor the man either. Nor the green cheese it's made of. Is that the sort of conversation Ena's been treating you to? If it is, no wonder you look bored stiff. You never could stand romance from any one but darling Pobbles."

"Don't speak of Kathleen in this house. It makes me want to bolt for home. Not that she'd look at me if I did. But the contrast between her and Ena Rolls—good Lord, it doesn't bear thinking of! Nothing doing about the Lady in the Moon so far as I'm concerned. It's Rolls who got moonstruck—according to his sister. Now can you guess whom I mean?"

Eileen's pleasant, plain little face flushed up.

"Oh, the Nadine girl on the ship! The one who looked so nice in the Moon dress. Petro bought it—for Ena. And she gave it to that fascinating girl. She—Ena, I mean—told me all about it."

"And about the girl, too?"

"What was there to tell?"

"Blamed if I know. But Ena was hinting dark things this afternoon. That's why I was wondering whether he'd opened out to you. You're such pals."

Eileen shook her head. She was not looking quite so bright as when Rags had first come into the overheated, overlighted, overdecorated room. But perhaps this was only because he had set her to thinking intently. "No, he's never spoken of the Lady in the Moon. Let me think—what was her name?"

"Miss Child."

"You seem to remember very well—you, who mix up all the wrong names with the right faces."

"But I saw her to-day. I forgot—I haven't told you of that yet, have I?"

"No. Where was it?"

"Wait a minute. Strictly speaking, I oughtn't to tell you, I suppose. All the same I will—for a reason—if you'll promise first not to mention it to Rolls. Never mind why not, but promise, if you want to know."

"Of course I want to know. You make me fearfully curious. I'll promise not to breathe a word to Petro."

"Where the girl is or anything about her?"

"'Where the girl is, or anything about her.' Honour bright. Is that enough? Well, then—go on!"

"She's in the shop—employed there, it seems. We met her in the lift, Ena and I. It was a surprise all round. Ena wasn't overjoyed. No more was the Lady in the Moon. They got rid of each other quickly and skilfully. Afterward, Ena buttonholed me and sat me down on a hard settee in a beastly furnished room like a rathskeller, with price tags on everything, and made me solemnly swear not to split to Rolls."

"About your meeting Miss Child?"

"Ra-ther! And all the rest of it."

"What rest?"

"A lot of rubbish. I don't know what she was driving at, I'm hanged if I do. But if I didn't like Rolls, I'd suspect."

"But you do like him. And so do I."

"I've noticed that. So would Mubs, if she ever noticed anything that didn't wave suffragette colours."

"And I shall go on liking him—'right straight on,' as he'd say himself. Nothing that Ena or anybody else could tell me would make me believe a word against him. And the girl's nice, too. I'm sure she is. But how too endlessly quaint she should be in the shop."

"She intimated politely, when we asked her questions, that it was a last resort."

"I should think so, indeed! She was—well, not a beauty exactly, but too weirdly fascinating."

"She hasn't changed. Only she looked scared at the sight of us. And she's thinner in the face. Her eyes seemed to have grown too big for it. Ena said Petro mustn't find out where she is. Rather rum—what?"

"Is this the thing that's made you so grumpy ever since?"

"I don't know that I've been grumpy. Only a bit reflective. The fact is—-"

"What?"

"Never mind. It wouldn't sound very nice."

"Who cares how it sounds? You might tell me, now we've got so far."

"Well, then, sometimes I wonder whether—the game's worth the candle. Whatever the rotten old proverb means!"

Eileen had no difficulty in understanding the allusion.

"She's got heaps of good things about her," the girl reminded him, being as loyal as was humanly possible to her hostess.

"Heaps. They're simply piled up in the corners of her nature. But I seemed to have wandered into an empty place to-day. By Jove, Eily, I thought I'd made up my mind. I'm fond of the old place at home, and I'd like, to see it done up properly. It isn't as if I'd ever care tuppence again about any girl on earth after—Kathleen. So what does anything of that sort matter? At least that's what I've been asking myself."

"I'm afraid Ena thinks you'll soon be asking her."

"Heavens! I suppose she does. Not that I've said a confounded word. I'm hanged if I know what to do! I tell you what. I'll wait and see how things go to-night. And then—maybe I'll toss up a penny."

"We ought to go down now, anyhow," said Eileen, still very thoughtful.

"Come along, then, and face the music."

"You go. I'll follow in a minute. I want to put this wonderful pink orchid in just the right place in my dress, and I shall be nervous if you watch me."

"What a ripper! Where did you get it?" Rags pretended that he cared to know the history of a wonderful, live-looking flower that lay on his sister's dressing-table.

"Petro. He bought it for me in the florist department of his father's shop. He said it was the latest addition—the department, not the orchid."

"Don't you get thinking too much about Rolls," grumbled Lord Raygan. "There may be something in that affair, after all. One can never be sure. Anyhow, I thought I'd tell you."

On that he closed the door, shutting himself out.

"Petro—and the Lady in the Moon," Eileen whispered, just above her breath, as she found the right place for the orchid.



CHAPTER XVI

THE SEED ENA PLANTED

Ena was glad when she saw Eileen wearing the orchid that Petro had bought for her in the gorgeous new department at the Hands. Rags had at the same time purchased some gardenias for Miss Rolls, she having mentioned that the gardenia was her favourite flower. Both girls tucked these trophies into the front of their coats, and wore them home. Also, they wore them again for dinner, a far more conspicuous compliment to the givers. Ena meant it to be taken as such, and faintly hoped, in spite of the afternoon's failure, that the thing she prayed for might happen that night. Perhaps Lord Raygan needed a little more encouragement, for, after all, she was rich and he was poor, and men did hesitate about proposing to heiresses—in novels.

Nothing did happen; but there was still time, for the guests were staying on for a cotillon, and there was a meeting at which Lady Raygan had faithfully promised to speak. It was a shame, however, that the effect of the orchid as well as the gardenias should be wasted, and the morning after their visit to the Hands, Ena made an opportunity of speaking to Petro alone.

He was in his own "den," one of the smallest rooms in the house, meant for a dressing-room, and opening off his bedroom. He had fitted it up as a nondescript lair, and indulged in ribald mirth if Ena tried to dignify it with the name of "study." All the pictures of the big animals he hadn't killed were there—beautiful wild things he felt he had the right to know socially, as he had never harmed them or their most distant relatives. In an old glass-fronted, secretary bookcase of mahogany, the first piece of "parlour furniture" his parents had ever bought, were the dear books of Petro's boyhood and early youth, and above, on the gray-papered wall, hung a portrait of mother, which her son had had painted by an unfashionable artist as a "birthday present from his affectionate self" at the age of sixteen. An ancient easy chair and a queer old sofa still had the original, slippery, black horsehair off which Petro and Ena had slid as children. Petro had named the sofa "the whale," and the squat chair "the seal." Both shiny, slippery, black things really did resemble sea monsters, and had never lost for Petro their mysterious personality.

There were some cushions and a fire screen, the bead-and-wool flowers of which mother had worked in early married life, and on the floor, in front of the friendly wood fire which Petro loved, lay a rug which was also her handiwork It was made of dresses her children had worn when they were very, very little, and some of her own which Petro could even now remember. Nobody save he, at Sea Gull Manor, cared for a grate fire; or if mother would have liked one, instead of a handwrought bronze radiator half hidden in the wall, she dared not say so. But she came and sat in Petro's den sometimes, crocheting in the old easy chair, when he was self indulgent enough to have a fire of ships' logs. The rose and gold and violet flames of the driftwood lit up for him the secret way to Dreamland and the country of Romance. What it did for mother, she did not say; but as her fingers moved, regularly as the ticking of a clock, her eyes would wander over the old furniture she had loved and back to the fire, as if she were trying to call up her own past and her son's future.

This morning Petro was not in a good mood, for he had been reading in the newspaper an interview with him which he hadn't given. It was all about the "Start in Life Fund," and sounded as if he were boasting, not only of the idea, but of the way in which he meant to carry it out. Nobody likes to be made to appear a conceited bounder when his intentions are as modest as those of a hermit crab, and a hundred times more benevolent.

Therefore, when Ena came, using as an excuse a dire need of notepaper, and stopped to dawdle, lighting one of his cigarettes, Petro felt an urgent desire to be cross. She had on some perfume which he hated, and a split skirt, and was altogether so inconvenient and uncongenial that disagreeable things to say sat on the end of his tongue. He bit them back, however, for he knew he should be sorry afterward if he were a beast.

"You look as if you'd like to snap my head off," said Ena, fumbling among his cigarettes.

"So I would. But I won't," said he. "It isn't you I mind. It's only something that Raygan would call bally rot in the paper."

"Something about us?" Ena was alert in a moment.

"Only about me."

"Is that all! You're so silly about having things in the paper! Almost anything's better than nothing, I feel, as long as they don't go raking up father's and mother's past. Oh, I know you think their past's the best thing about them. Let's not argue. Does it say again that you're engaged to Eileen?"

"No, thank heaven. I don't want to punch heads in her defence."

His sister laughed, and tried to make herself comfortable by putting her feet up on the slippery whale. The split green cloth skirt fell apart and showed a pink ankle clad in a tight-fitting film of green silk stocking. Ena gazed at it appreciatively and liked the look of her foot in a high-heeled green suede shoe with a gold buckle.

"My private opinion is that dear little Eileen was tickled to death by the mistake. The only thing she didn't like about it was—its being a mistake."

"If you talk like that, I'll wish the whale was Jonah's," said Petro.

"She does love you!" Ena got out hurriedly, fearing to be stopped, or caught up in the surprisingly strong arms of Petro, and gently set down on the wrong side of the door. "She does! She does! I've thought so a long time. Now I know it. I mustn't tell you how."

"You oughtn't to tell me how. It isn't true and it isn't kind—to either of us. I hate hearing such darned nonsense about a girl who likes me as a friend. And she'd be mad as the dickens if she could hear."

"Perhaps she'd be mad," Ena admitted, "because it is true. If it weren't she'd only laugh. You're a simple Simon not to see. Everybody else with eyes does see. And they'll all be sorry for her if you don't speak."