with denials, but sat listening to
him with a smiling face. Whereupon he brought his fist down on the
desk and called me a soft-brained idiot.

"Of course, Malcolm," he said, "I don't know who she is, but my advice
to you is, whoever she is and whatever she is, get her out of your
mind."

At that very moment Malcolm's mind was occupied with just these
questions: Who was she? What was she?

With a sense of duty to Gladys Todd I strove hard to put Penelope
Blight out of my thoughts, but I could not. Sometimes I would recall
the face of the girl whom I had seen in the morning, and every feature
would bring back the child of the mountains. Then I went to
directories and searched them for the name of Rufus Blight, but I could
get no trace of him. I evolved a theory that Penelope was the guest of
the woman with the Pomeranian. The carriage must belong to either the
elder or the younger woman. Granting that the younger was Penelope,
then the elder could not be her mother. As I had examined many
directories and found none that gave her uncle's name as living in the
city, I had to conclude that the owner of the Pomeranian was her
hostess and that I was the victim of a trick of fate which had allowed
her to flash across my path and disappear, which had allowed me to have
but this tantalizing glimpse. Then I found consolation in the thought
that after all a glimpse was enough for my peace of mind. Indeed, if
this really were Penelope, then it had been best that I had never seen
her at all, grown to such loveliness.

Considering myself as I sat in my shirt-sleeves amid grimy workaday
surroundings, remembering the frayed environment of my life uptown,
this Penelope, stepping, daintily booted and gloved, out of that
perfect equipage, was indeed a being who moved in higher airs than I.
Here was an insuperable difficulty. In the valley, David Malcolm, with
the blood of the McLaurins in his veins, might look with contempt on
the Blights and their kind. But we were no longer in the valley, and a
Blight driving down the Avenue in a brougham, drawn by high-headed
horses and manned by haughty servants, would see me not as the head of
a wealthy patrician house, but as a young man on his way from his
boarding-house to labor for a petty wage. Such a reversal of our
relative conditions was so incredible that I found myself arguing that
I could not have seen Penelope Blight, and I tried to return to loyal
devotion to Gladys To