very night," he declared. He made out an itinerary,
punctuated by theaters and restaurants, which Stella consented to
accept as a substitute for Atlantic City.

"They give your fellows a week off when they're married, don't
they?" she asked.

"Yes, but I'll want to drop into the office every morning to look
after my mail. That's only businesslike."

"I'd like to have you treated as well as the others, though." Stella
turned the rings about on her pale hand and looked at her polished
finger-tips.

"I'll look out for that. What do you say to a little walk, Stell'?"
Percy put the question coaxingly. When Stella was pleased with him
she went to walk with him, since that was the only way in which
Percy could ever see her alone. When she was displeased, she said
she was too tired to go out. To-night she smiled at him
incredulously, and went to put on her hat and gray fur piece.

Once they were outside, Percy turned into a shadowy side street that
was only partly built up, a dreary waste of derricks and foundation
holes, but comparatively solitary. Stella liked Percy's steady,
sympathetic silences; she was not a chatterbox herself. She often
wondered why she was going to marry Bixby instead of Charley
Greengay. She knew that Charley would go further in the world.
Indeed, she had often coolly told herself that Percy would never go
very far. But, as she admitted with a shrug, she was "weak to
Percy." In the capable New York stenographer, who estimated values
coldly and got the most for the least outlay, there was something
left that belonged to another kind of woman--something that liked
the very things in Percy that were not good business assets. However
much she dwelt upon the effectiveness of Greengay's dash and color
and assurance, her mind always came back to Percy's neat little
head, his clean-cut face, and warm, clear, gray eyes, and she liked
them better than Charley's fullness and blurred floridness. Having
reckoned up their respective chances with no doubtful result, she
opposed a mild obstinacy to her own good sense. "I guess I'll take
Percy, _anyway_," she said simply, and that was all the good her
clever business brain did her.

* * * * *

Percy spent a night of torment, lying tense on his bed in the dark,
and figuring out how long it would take him to pay back the money he
was advancing to himself. Any fool could do it in five years, he
reasoned, but he was going to do it in