st Culver, paid no attention. "If he
don't let you alone," he said, "I'll thrash him into a hospital for six
months. You must leave his office at once. You'll not go back there."

"You must be crazy," replied she, calm again. "I've no complaint to make
of the way I'm being treated. I never was so well off in my life. And
Mr. Culver is very kind and polite."

"You know what that means," said Norman harshly.

"Everyone isn't like you," retorted she.

He was examining her from head to foot, as if to make sure that it was
she with no charm missing. He noted that she was much less poorly
dressed than when she worked for his firm. In those days she often
looked dowdy, showed plainly the girl who has to make a hasty toilet in
a small bedroom, with tiny wash-stand and looking-glass, in the early,
coldest hours of a cold morning. Now she looked well taken care of
physically, not so well, not anything like so well as the women
uptown--the ladies with nothing to do but make toilettes; still,
unusually well looked after for a working girl. At first glance after
those famished and ravening days of longing for her and seeking her, she
before him in rather dim reality of the obvious office-girl, seemed
disappointing. It could not be that this insignificance was the cause of
all his fever and turmoil. He began to hope that he was recovering, that
the cloud of insane desire was clearing from his sky. But a second
glance killed that hope. For, once more he saw her mystery, her beauties
that revealed their perfection and splendor only to the observant.

While he looked she was regaining her balance, as the fading color in
her white skin and the subsidence of the excitement in her eyes
evidenced. "Let me pass, please," she said coldly--for, she was against
the wall with him standing before her in such a way that she could not
go until he moved aside.

"We'll lunch together," he said. "I want to talk with you. Did that
well-meaning ass--Tetlow--tell you?"

"There is nothing you can say that I wish to hear," was her quiet reply.

"Your eyes--the edges of the lids are red. You have been crying?"

She lifted her glance to his and he had the sense of a veil drawing
aside to reveal a desolation. "For my father," she said.

His face flushed. He looked steadily at her. "Now that he is gone, you
have no one to protect you. I am----"

"I need no one," said she with a faintly contemptuous smile.

"You do need some one--and I am going to