hould still say no--a thousand times no! Now will you open
the door and let me go?"

He turned and fumbled for the door-knob like a man in a daze.

"Don't you--don't you think you might learn to--to think of me in that
way?--after a while?" he pleaded.

He had opened the door a little way, and she slipped past him. But in
the corridor she turned and laughed at him again.

"I am going to cure you--you, personally, as well as the sick
situation--Mr. Raymer," she said flippantly. Then, mimicking him as a
spoiled child might have done: "I might possibly learn to--think of
you--in that way--after a while. But I could never, never, _never_ learn
to love your mother and your sister."

And with that spiteful thrust she left him.

XXXVI

THE GRAY WOLF

As it chanced, Jasper Grierson was in the act of concluding a long and
apparently satisfactory telephone conversation with his agent in Duluth
at the moment when the door of his private room opened and his daughter
entered.

As on a former occasion, she went to sit in the window until the way to
free speech should be open, and she could not well help hearing the
closing words of the long-distance conference.

"You sit tight in the boat; that's all you've got to do," her father was
saying. "Keep the young fellow with you as long as you can; the other
man is too sick to talk business, right now. When you can't hold the
young one any longer, let me know. We'll play the hand out as it lays.
Get that? I say, we'll play the hand out as it lays."

He had hung the receiver on its hook and was pushing the bracketted
telephone-set aside when Margery crossed the room swiftly and placed an
envelope, the counterpart of the one left with Raymer, on the desk.

"There is your notice to quit," she said calmly. "You threw me down and
gave me the double-cross the other day, and now I've come back at you."

Another man might have hastened to meet the crisis. But the gray wolf
was of a different mettle. He let the envelope lie untouched until after
he had pulled out a drawer in the desk, found his box of cigars, and had
leisurely selected and lighted one of the fat black monstrosities. When
he tore the envelope across, the photographic print fell out, and he
studied it carefully for many seconds before he read the accompanying
documents. For a little time after he had tossed the papers aside there
was a silence that bit. Then he said, slowly:

"So that's your raise, is it? Whe