it carry you too far up. You might come down with a
thud!"

"He's right enough there," was what Burns murmured to himself as he
caught the elevator in the great building in which Buller's office was
a crowded corner. "I may come down in just that style. But better that
than any more of this dead level of suspense. I don't think I could
stand that one more day."

He and Johnny Caruthers whirled home in the Imp to find Burns's village
office as crowded as Buller's city one. It was late before he could get
his dinner, and after it he was kept busy turning calls over to other
men. It was the usual experience to have work pile up during the last
hours, as if Fate were against his breaking his chains and meant to tie
him hand and foot.

"I'm going to get out of this right now," he announced suddenly to Miss
Mathewson an hour before train time, as he turned away from a siege over
the telephone with one hysterical lady who felt that her life depended
upon his remaining to see her through an attack of indigestion. "If I
don't, something will come in that will pull hard to keep me home, and
I'm not going to be kept. I'll trust you not to look me up for the next
hour, for I'll not tell you where I'm going, and you can't guess, you
know. Good-bye. Be a good girl."

He wrung her hand, looking at her with that warmth of friendliness which
he was accustomed, when in the mood, to bestow on her, recognizing how
invaluable she was to him, and never once recking what it meant to her
to be so closely associated with him. She answered in her usual quiet
way, wishing him a safe journey and bidding him be very careful of the
arm, no longer protected except by the silken sign that injury had been
done.

"In a crowd, you know, they won't notice the sling," she warned him.

"Won't they? Well, if my trusty left can't protect my battered right
I've forgotten my boxing tricks. Don't be anxious about that, little
friend. See that Amy Mathewson has a good time in my absence, will you?
She's looking just a bit worn, to me."

She smiled, but her eyes did not meet his: she dared not let them. With
all his kindness to her he did not often speak with the real affection
which was in his voice now. She understood that he was, for some reason,
keyed high over his prospective journey even higher than he had been ten
days before when on the point of leaving. And she knew well enough where
he was going, though he had not told her. It would have taken th