nted.

"Dear boy!" said she.

"That I have waited seven years for her."

"Poor boy!" said she.

"That I shall wait seven more for her."

"Silly boy!" said she.

"And so I stopped this afternoon to tell her that I'm coming home to
marry her in two or three months."

"Coming home?" she questioned with not much interest. "Where are you
going?"

"To Japan on a little business trip. One of the big houses wants to get
some papers and testimony and that sort of thing out of a man who is
living in a backwoods village there for his health--and his liberty.
None of their own men can afford time to go. And I got the chance, a
very good one for me--but I tire you."

"No; oh, no," said Miss Knowles politely. "You are very interesting."

"Then you shouldn't fidget and yawn. You lay yourself open to
misinterpretation. To continue: a very great chance for me. The firm is
a big firm, the case is a big case, and it will be a great thing for me
to be heard of in connection with it."

"Some nasty scandal, of course."

"Not exactly. It is the Drewitt case. I wonder if you heard anything
about it."

"For three months after the thing happened," she assured him with a
flattering accession of interest, "I heard nothing about anything else.
Poor, dear father knew him, to his cost, you know. I heard that there
was to be a new investigation and another attempt at a settlement. And
now you're going to interview the man! And you're going to Japan! Oh,
the colossal luck of some people! You will write to me--won't you?--as
soon as you see him, and tell me all about him. How he looks, what he
says, how he justifies himself. O Jimmie, dear Jimmie, you will surely
write to me?"

"Naturally," said Jimmie, and his thin, young face looked happier than
it had at any other time since the beginning of this conversation;
happier than it had in many preceding conversations with this very
unsatisfying but charming interlocutor. "I always do. Sometimes when
your mood has been particularly, well, unreceptive, I have thought of
going away so that I might write to you. Perhaps I could write more
convincingly than I can talk." A cheering condition of things for a
lawyer, he reflected.

"But this is a different and much more particular thing," she insisted
with a cruelty of which her interest made her unconscious. "I have a
sort of a right to know on account of poor, dear father. I shall make a
list of questions and you will answer them fully, won'