ness?"

"Business? No; you've been neglecting me!"

"Now, T. A., you've just come from the tailor's, and I suppose it
didn't fit in the back."

"It isn't that," interrupted Buck, "and you know it. Look here! That
day Jock went away and we came back to the office, and you said----"

"I know I said it, T. A., but don't remind me of it. That wasn't a
fair test. I had just seen Jock leave me to take his own place in the
world. You know that my day began and ended with him. He was my
reason for everything. When I saw him off for Chicago that day, and
knew he was going there to stay, it seemed a million miles from New
York. I was blue and lonely and heart-sick. If the office-boy had
thrown a kind word to me I'd have broken down and wept on his shoulder."

Buck, still standing, looked down between narrowed lids at his business
partner.

"Emma McChesney," he said steadily, "do you mean that?"

Mrs. McChesney, the straightforward, looked up, looked down, fiddled
with the letter in her hand.

"Well--practically yes--that is--I thought, now that you're going to
the mountains for a month, it might give me a chance to think--to----"

"And d'you know what I'll do meanwhile, out of revenge on the sex?
I've just ordered three suits of white flannel, and I shall break every
feminine heart in the camp, regardless-- Oh, say, that's what I came in
to tell you! Guess whom I saw at the tailor's?"

"Well, Mr. Bones, whom did you, and so forth?"

"Fat Ed Meyers. I just glimpsed him in one of the fitting-rooms. And
they were draping him in white."

Emma McChesney sat up with a jerk.

"Are you sure?"

"Sure? There's only one figure like that. He had the thing on and was
surveying himself in the mirror--or as much of himself as could be seen
in one ordinary mirror. In that white suit, with his red face above
it, he looked like those pictures you see labeled, 'Sunrise on
Snow-covered Mountain.'"

"Did he see----"

"He dodged when he saw me. Actually! At least, he seems to have the
decency to be ashamed of the deal he gave us when he left us flat in
the thick of his Middle Western trip and went back to the Sans-Silk
Skirt Company. I wanted him to know I had seen him. As I passed, I
said, 'You'll mow 'em down in those clothes, Meyers.'" Buck sat down
in his leisurely fashion, and laughed his low, pleasant laugh. "Can't
you see him, Emma, at the seashore?"

But something in Emma McChesney's eyes, and someth