her attitude was to put out a hand quietly, touch
her arm, not once looking at her, and say in a lowered tone,

"Steady, Bobs." And then, "Did you say one lump or two?"

"None." Her voice was scarcely audible, but I saw she was going to stay;
that Worth was to have his way, to get from her the opinion he
wanted--whatever that might amount to. And I passed the paper to him,
suggesting,

"Let her read it. This is too public a place to be declaiming a thing of
the sort."

She hesitated a minute then gave it such a mere flirt of a glance that I
hardly thought she'd seen what it was, before she raised inquiring eyes
to mine and asked coldly,

"Why shouldn't that be read--shouted every ten minutes by the traffic
officer at Market and Kearny? They'd only think he was paging every
other man in the Palace Hotel."

I leaned back and chuckled. After a bare glance, this sharp witted girl
had hit on exactly what I'd thought of the Clayte description.

"Is that all? May I go now, Worth?" she said, still with that dashed,
disappointed look from one of us to the other. "If you'll just put me on
a Haight Street car--I won't wait for--" And now she made a definite
movement to rise; but again Worth held her by the mere touch of his
fingers on her sleeve.

"Wait, Bobs," he said. "There's more."

"More?" Her eyes on Worth's face talked louder than her tongue, but that
also gained fluency as he looked back at her and nodded. "Stunts!" she
repeated his word bitterly. "I didn't expect you to come back asking me
to do stunts. I hated it all so--working out things like a calculating
machine!" Her voice sank to a vehement undertone. "Nobody thinking of
me as human, with human feelings. I have never--done--one stunt--since
my father died."

She didn't weaken. She sat there and looked Worth squarely in the eye,
yet there was a kind of big gentleness in her refusal, a freedom from
petty resentment, that had in it not so much a girl's hurt vanity as the
outspoken complaint of a really grieved heart.

"But, Bobs," Worth smiled at her trouble, about the same careless,
good-natured smile he had given little Pete when he flipped him the
quarter, "suppose you could possibly save me a hundred thousand dollars
a minute?"

"Then it's not just a stunt?" She settled slowly back in her chair.

"Certainly not," I said. "This is business--with me, anyhow. Miss
Wallace, why do you think a description like that could be shouted on
the street withou