live. But though the girl was sweetly gentle in her appreciation
of Kate's thoughtful attentions, in her simple way she made us both feel
that our efforts would be for naught, that her position must be the same
as that of any other clerk in the office. We both finally left her to
herself. Bob explained to me, some three weeks after she came to the
office, that she received no visitors at her home, a hotel on a quiet
uptown street, and that even he had never had permission to call upon her
there.

But from the day she came to occupy her desk in our office, Bob was a
changed man, whether for better or for worse neither Kate nor I could
decide. His old bounding elasticity was gone, and with it his rollicking
laugh. He was now a man where before he had been a boy, a man with a
burden. Even if I had not heard Beulah Sands's story, I should have
guessed that Bob was staggering under a strange load. While before, from
the close of the Stock Exchange until its opening the next morning, he
was, as Kate was fond of putting it, always ready to fill in for anything
from chaperon to nurse, always open for any lark we planned, from a
Bohemian dinner to the opera, now weeks went by without our seeing him at
our house. In the office it used to be a saying that outside gong-strikes,
Bob Brownley did not know he was in the stock business. Formerly every
clerk knew when Bob came or went, for it was with a rush, a shout, a
laugh, and a bang of doors; and on the floor of the Stock Exchange no man
played so many pranks, or filled his orders with so much jolly good-nature
and hilarious boisterousness. But from the day the Virginian girl crossed
his path, Bob Brownley was a man who was thinking, thinking, thinking all
the time. It was only with an effort that he would keep his eyes on
whomever he was talking with long enough to take in what was said, and if
the saying occupied much time it would be apparent to the talker that Bob
was off in the clouds. All his friends and associates remarked the change,
but I alone, except perhaps Kate, had any idea of the cause. I knew that
two million dollars and the coming New Year were hurdling like kangaroos
over Bob's mental rails and ditches, though I did not know it from
anything he told me, for after that talk on the upper deck of the
_Tribesman_ he had shut up like a clam.

He did not exactly shun me, but showed me in many ways that he had entered
into a new world, in which he desired to be alone. Th