, incurious, taciturn. Pop
Henderson listened, one scant old eyebrow raised knowingly, a whimsical
half-smile screwing up his wrinkled face.

At the end of three weeks, Hortense, with that display of temperament
so often encountered in young ladies of her profession, announced in
desperation that, if this thing kept on, she was going to forget
herself and jeopardize her position by demanding to know outright what
the trouble was.

From the direction of Pop Henderson's inky retreat, there came the
sound of a dry chuckle. Pop Henderson had been chuckling in just that
way for three weeks, now. It was getting on the nerves of his
colleagues.

"If you ever spring the joke that's kept you giggling for a month,"
snapped Hortense, "it'll break up the office."

Pop Henderson removed his eye-shade very deliberately, passed his thin,
cramped old hand over his scant gray locks to his bald spot, climbed
down stiffly from his stool, ambled to the center of the room, and,
head cocked like a knowing old brown sparrow, regarded the pert
Hortense over his spectacles and under his spectacles and, finally,
through his spectacles.

"Young folks now 'days," began Pop Henderson dryly, "are so darned cute
and knowin' that when an old fellow cuts in ahead of 'em for once, he
likes to hug the joke to himself a while before he springs it." There
was no acid in his tone. He was beaming very benignantly down upon the
little blond stenographer. "You say that Mrs. Mack is
absent-minded-like and dreamy, and that young T. A. acts like he'd
swallowed an electric battery. Well, when it comes to that, I've seen
you many a time, when you didn't know any one was lookin', just sitting
there at your typewriter, with your hands kind of poised halfway, and
your lips sort of parted, and your eyes just gazing away somewhere off
in the distance for fifteen minutes at a stretch. And out there in the
shipping-room Henry's singing like a whole minstrel troupe all day
long, when he isn't whistlin' so loud you can hear him over 's far as
Eighth Avenue." Then, as the red surged up through the girl's fair
skin, "Well?" drawled old Pop Henderson, and the dry chuckle threatened
again. "We-e-ell?"

"Why, Pop Henderson!" exploded Miss Kelly from her cage.
"Why--Pop--Henderson!"

In those six words the brisk and agile-minded Miss Kelly expressed the
surprise and the awed conviction of the office staff.

Pop Henderson trotted over to the water-cooler, drew