gestion of a flush coming and going in her withered cheeks. The
emotion of one of these chance meetings remained with them during all
the rest of the day.

Was it the first romance in the lives of each? Did Old Grannis ever
remember a certain face amongst those that he had known when he was
young Grannis--the face of some pale-haired girl, such as one sees in
the old cathedral towns of England? Did Miss Baker still treasure up
in a seldom opened drawer or box some faded daguerreotype, some strange
old-fashioned likeness, with its curling hair and high stock? It was
impossible to say.

Maria Macapa, the Mexican woman who took care of the lodgers' rooms, had
been the first to call the flat's attention to the affair, spreading the
news of it from room to room, from floor to floor. Of late she had made
a great discovery; all the women folk of the flat were yet vibrant with
it. Old Grannis came home from his work at four o'clock, and between
that time and six Miss Baker would sit in her room, her hands idle in
her lap, doing nothing, listening, waiting. Old Grannis did the same,
drawing his arm-chair near to the wall, knowing that Miss Baker was upon
the other side, conscious, perhaps, that she was thinking of him; and
there the two would sit through the hours of the afternoon, listening
and waiting, they did not know exactly for what, but near to each other,
separated only by the thin partition of their rooms. They had come
to know each other's habits. Old Grannis knew that at quarter of five
precisely Miss Baker made a cup of tea over the oil stove on the stand
between the bureau and the window. Miss Baker felt instinctively the
exact moment when Old Grannis took down his little binding apparatus
from the second shelf of his clothes closet and began his favorite
occupation of binding pamphlets--pamphlets that he never read, for all
that.

In his "Parlors" McTeague began his week's work. He glanced in the glass
saucer in which he kept his sponge-gold, and noticing that he had
used up all his pellets, set about making some more. In examining Miss
Baker's teeth at the preliminary sitting he had found a cavity in one
of the incisors. Miss Baker had decided to have it filled with gold.
McTeague remembered now that it was what is called a "proximate case,"
where there is not sufficient room to fill with large pieces of gold. He
told himself that he should have to use "mats" in the filling. He made
some dozen of these "mats" f