ider's parlor of
commerce. And I found a ridiculous timidity creeping over me as I went
up in the elevator, and found the door-number, and saw myself
confronted by a cadaverous urchin in horn-rimmed specs, who thrust a
paper-covered novel behind his chair-back and asked me what I wanted.
So I asked him if this was Mr. McKail's office.

"Sure," he said in the established vernacular of the West.

"What is your name, little boy?" I inquired, with the sternest brand
of condescension I could command.

The young monkey drew himself up at that and flushed angrily. "Oh, I
don't know as I'm so little," he observed, regarding me with a
narrowing eye as I stepped unbidden beyond the sacred portals.

"Where will I find Mr. McKail's secretary?" I asked, noticing the door
in the stained-wood partition with "Private" on its frosted glass. The
youth nodded his head toward the door in question and crossed to a
desk where he proceeded languidly to affix postage-stamps to a small
pile of envelopes.

I hesitated for a moment, as though there was something epochal in the
air, as though I was making a step which might mean a great deal to
me. And then I stepped over to the door and opened it.

I saw a young woman seated at a flat-topped desk, with a gold-banded
fountain-pen in her fingers, checking over a column of figures. She
checked carefully on to the end of her column, and then she raised her
head and looked at me.

Her face stood out with singular distinctness, in the strong
side-light from the office-window. And the woman seated at the
flat-topped desk was Alsina Teeswater.

I don't know how long I stood there without speaking. But I could see
the color slowly mount and recede on Alsina Teeswater's face. She put
down her fountain-pen, with much deliberation, and sat upright in her
chair, with her barricaded eyes every moment of the time on my face.

"So this has started again?" I finally said, in little more than a
whisper.

I could see the girl's lips harden. I could see her fortifying herself
behind an entrenchment of quietly marshaled belligerency.

"It has never stopped, Mrs. McKail," she said in an equally low voice,
but with the courage of utter desperation.

It took some time, apparently, for that declaration to filter through
to my brain. Everything seemed suddenly out of focus; and it was hard
to readjust vision to the newer order of things. But I was calmer,
under the circumstances, than I expected to be.

"