fact, the entire office staff--heads of
departments, writers, secretaries, stenographers, office boys--would
suspend business and crowd to the windows to see the pageant pass in the
street below. Stirring music, khaki columns, flags, pennants, horses,
bugles. And always the Jackie band from the Great Lakes Station, its
white leggings twinkling down the street in the lead of its six-foot-six
contortionistic drum-major.

By October the window-gazers, watching the parades from the Raynor
windows, were mostly petticoated and exclamatory. Jock stayed away from
the window now. It seemed to his tortured mind that there was a fresh
parade hourly, and that bugles and bands sounded a taunting note.

"Where are _you_! (sounded the bugle)
Where are _you_?
Where are YOU?!!!
Where
are
you?
Where--are--you-u-u-u--"

He slammed down the windows, summoned a stenographer, and gave out
dictation in a loud, rasping voice.

"Yours of the tenth at hand, and contents noted. In reply I wish to
say--"

_(Boom! Boom! And a boom-boom-boom!)_

"--all copy for the Sans Scent Soap is now ready for your approval and
will be mailed to you to-day under separate cover. We in the office
think that this copy marks a new record in soap advertising--"

_(Over there! Over there! Send the word, send the word over there!)_

"Just read that last line will you, Miss Dugan?"

"Over th--I mean, 'We in the office think that this copy marks a new
record in soap advertising--'"

"H'm. Yes." A moment's pause. A dreamy look on the face of the girl
stenographer. Jock interpreted it. He knew that the stenographer was in
the chair at the side of his desk, taking his dictation accurately and
swiftly, while the spirit of the girl herself was far and away at Camp
Grant at Rockford, Illinois, with an olive-drab unit in an olive-drab
world.

"--and, in fact, in advertising copy of any description that has been
sent out from the Raynor offices."

The girl's pencil flew over the pad. But when Jock paused for thought or
breath she lifted her head and her eyes grew soft and bright, and her
foot, in its absurd high-heeled gray boot, beat a smart left! Left!
Left-right-left!

Something of this picture T.A. Buck saw in his untasted coffee cup. Much
of it Emma visualized in her speeding motor car. All of it Grace knew by
heart as she moved about the new, shining house in the Chicago suburb,
thinking, planning; feelin