said:

"Please have your typewriter brought in here. I want you to do some work
for me--work that isn't to be spoken of--not even to Mr. Tetlow." He
looked at her with grave penetrating eyes. "You will not speak of it?"

"No," replied she, and nothing more. But she accompanied the simple
negative with a clear and honest sincerity of the eyes that set his mind
completely at rest. He felt that this girl had never in her life told a
real lie.

One of the office boys installed the typewriter, and presently Norman
and the quiet nebulous girl at whom no one would trouble to look a
second time were seated opposite each other with the broad table desk
between, he leaning far back in his desk chair, fingers interlocked
behind his proud, strong-looking head, she holding sharpened pencil
suspended over the stenographic notebook. Long before she seated herself
he had forgotten her except as machine. There followed a troubled hour,
as he dictated, ordered erasure, redictated, ordered re-readings,
skipped back and forth, in the effort to frame the secret agreement in
the fewest and simplest, and least startlingly unlawful, words. At last
he leaned forward with the shine of triumph in his eyes.

"Read straight through," he commanded.

She read, interrupted occasionally by a sharp order from him to correct
some mistake in her notes.

"Again," he commanded, when she translated the last of her notes.

This time she was not interrupted once. When she ended, he exclaimed:
"Good! I don't see how you did it so well."

"Nor do I," said she.

"You say you are only a beginner."

"I couldn't have done it so well for anyone else," said she. "You
are--different."

The remark was worded most flatteringly, but it did not sound so. He saw
that she did not herself understand what she meant by "different." _He_
understood, for he knew the difference between the confused and
confusing ordinary minds and such an intelligence as his own--simple,
luminous, enlightening all minds, however dark, so long as they were in
the light-flooded region around it.

"Have I made the meaning clear?" he asked.

He hoped she would reply that he had not, though this would have
indicated a partial defeat in the object he had--to put the complex
thing so plainly that no one could fail to understand. But she answered,
"Yes."

He congratulated himself that his overestimate of her ignorance of
affairs had not lured him into giving her the names of the parties