number can achieve, the figures
after that going in couples. It was an open secret that the tragedy of
Mr. Chester's uneventful life lay in that simple fact.

In addition to Quin's heterogeneous duties at the office, he was
frequently pressed into service for more personal uses. When Mr. Ranny
failed to put in an appearance, he was invariably dispatched to find him,
and was often able to handle the situation in a way that was a great
relief to all concerned.

One day, after he had been with the firm several weeks, he was dispatched
with a budget of papers for Madam Bartlett to sign. It was the first time
he had entered the house since the night of the accident, and as he stood
in the front hall waiting instructions, he looked about him curiously.

The lower floor had been "done" in peacock blue and gold when Miss Enid
made her debut twenty years before, and it had never been undone. An
embossed dado and an even more embossed frieze encircled the walls, and
the ceiling was a complicated mosaic of color and design. The
stiff-backed chairs and massive sofas were apparently committed for life
to linen strait-jackets. Heavy velvet curtains shut out the light and a
faint smell of coal soot permeated the air. Over the hall fireplace hung
a large portrait of Madam Bartlett, just inside the drawing-room gleamed
a marble bust of her, and two long pier-glasses kept repeating the image
of her until she dominated every nook and corner of the place.

But Quin saw little of all this. To him the house was simply a background
for images of Eleanor: Eleanor coming down the broad stairs in her blue
and gray costume; Eleanor tripping through the hall in her Red Cross
uniform; Eleanor standing in the doorway in the moonlight, telling him
how wonderful he was.

He had written her exactly ten letters since her departure, but only two
had been dispatched, and by a fatal error these two were identical. After
a superhuman effort to couch his burning thoughts in sufficiently cool
terms, he had achieved a partially successful result; but, discovering
after addressing the envelope that he had misspelled two words, he
laboriously made another copy, addressed a second envelope, then
inadvertently mailed both.

He had received such a scoffing note in reply that his ears tingled even
now as he thought of it. It was only when he recalled the postscript that
he found consolation. "How funny that you should get a position at
Bartlett & Bangs's," sh