yours,

PETER RUFF.

Miss Brown glanced through the advertisement and closed her notebook
with a little snap.

"Did you say--'Dear Sir'?" she asked.

"Certainly!" Peter Ruff answered.

"And you really mean," she continued, with obvious disapproval, "that I
am to send this?"

"I do not usually waste my time," Peter Ruff reminded her, mildly, "by
giving you down communications destined for the waste-paper basket."

She turned unwillingly to her machine.

"Mr. Fitzgerald is very much better where he is," she remarked.

"That depends," he answered.

She adjusted a sheet of paper into her typewriter.

"Who do you suppose 'M' is?" she asked.

"With your assistance," Peter Ruff remarked, a little
sarcastically--"with your very kind assistance--I propose to find out!"

Miss Brown sniffed, and banged at the keys of her typewriter.

"That coal-dealer's girl from Streatham!" she murmured to herself....

A few politely worded letters were exchanged. "M" declined to reveal her
identity, but made an appointment to visit Mr. Ruff at his office. The
morning she was expected, he wore an entirely new suit of clothes and
was palpably nervous. Miss Brown, who had arrived a little late, sat
with her back turned upon him, and ignored even his usual morning
greeting. The atmosphere of the office was decidedly chilly!
Fortunately, the expected visitor arrived early.

Peter Ruff rose to receive his former sweetheart with an agitation
perforce concealed, yet to him poignant indeed. For it was indeed
Maud who entered the room and came towards him with carefully studied
embarrassment and half doubtfully extended hand. He did not see the
cheap millinery, the slightly more developed figure, the passing of
that insipid prettiness which had once charmed him into the bloom of an
over-early maturity. His eyes were blinded with that sort of masculine
chivalry--the heritage only of fools and very clever men--which takes no
note of such things. It was Miss Brown who, from her place in a corner
of the room, ran over the cheap attractions of this unwelcome visitor
with an expression of scornful wonder--who understood the tinsel of her
jewellery, the cheap shoddiness of her ready-made gown; who appreciated,
with merciless judgment, her mincing speech, her cheap, flirtatious
method.

Maud, with a diffidence not altogether assumed, had accepted the chair
which Peter Ruff had placed for her, and sat fidgeting, for a moment,
with the im