Grey's unmistakable awe, a thrill went through the
president. For an instant he was silent.

"That will do, boys," he said finally. "It's a queer story; but
remember, it's all the more reason now for our keeping our secret. As
for those things, I'll remove them quietly and at once."

But he did not.

On the contrary, prolonging his stay at the hotel with plausible
reasons, he managed to frequently visit the committee room or its
vicinity, at different and unsuspected hours of the day and night.
More than that, he found opportunities to visit the office, and under
pretexts of business connected with the economy of the hotel management,
informed himself through Miss Marsh on many points. A few of these
details naturally happened to refer to herself, her prospects, her
tastes, and education. He learned incidentally, what he had partly
known, that her father had been in better circumstances, and that she
had been gently nurtured--though of this she made little account in her
pride in her own independence and devotion to her duties. But in his
own persistent way he also made private notes of the breadth of her
shoulders, the size of her waist, her height, length of her skirt, her
movements in walking, and other apparently extraneous circumstances. It
was natural that he acquired some supplemental facts,--that her
eyes, under her eye-glasses, were a tender gray, and touched with the
melancholy beauty of near-sightedness; that her face had a sensitive
mobility beyond the mere charm of color, and like most people lacking
this primitive and striking element of beauty, what was really fine
about her escaped the first sight. As, for instance, it was only
by bending over to examine her accounts that he found that her
indistinctive hair was as delicate as floss silk and as electrical. It
was only by finding her romping with the children of a guest one evening
that he was startled by the appalling fact of her youth! But about this
time he left the hotel and returned to his house.

On the first yearly anniversary of the great strike at Excelsior there
were some changes in the settlement, notably the promotion of Mr. Marsh
to a more important position in the company, and the installation of
Miss Cassie Marsh as manageress of the hotel. As Miss Marsh read the
official letter, signed by the president, conveying in complimentary but
formal terms this testimony of their approval and confidence, her lip
trembled slightly, and a tear tri