bridge, but was impelled by a consciousness of the abruptness of her
departure to look back at him once--and smile, to experience again the
thrill of the current he sped after her. By lifting his hat, a little
higher, a little more confidently than in the first instance, he made her
leaving seem more gracious, the act somehow conveying an acknowledgment
on his part that their relationship had changed.

Once across the bridge and in the mill, she fairly ran up the stairs and
into the empty office, to perceive her bag lying on the desk where she
had left it, and sat down for a few minutes beside the window, her heart
pounding in her breast as though she had barely escaped an accident
threatening her with physical annihilation. Something had happened to her
at last! But what did it mean? Where would it lead? Her fear, her
antagonism, of which she was still conscious, her resentment that Ditmar
had thus surreptitiously chosen to approach her in a moment when they
were unobserved were mingled with a throbbing exultation in that he had
noticed her, that there was something in her to attract him in that way,
to make his voice thicker and his smile apologetic when he spoke to her.
Of that "something-in-her" she had been aware before, but never had it
been so unmistakably recognized and beckoned to from without. She was at
once terrified, excited--and flattered.

At length, growing calmer, she made her way out of the building. When she
reached the vestibule she had a moment of sharp apprehension, of
paradoxical hope, that Ditmar might still be there, awaiting her. But he
had gone....

In spite of her efforts to dismiss the matter from her mind, to persuade
herself there had been no significance in the encounter, when she was
seated at her typewriter the next morning she experienced a renewal of
the palpitation of the evening before, and at the sound of every step in
the corridor she started. Of this tendency she was profoundly ashamed.
And when at last Ditmar arrived, though the blood rose to her temples,
she kept her eyes fixed on the keys. He went quickly into his room: she
was convinced he had not so much as glanced at her.... As the days went
by, however, she was annoyed by the discovery that his continued ignoring
of her presence brought more resentment than relief, she detected in it a
deliberation implying between them a guilty secret: she hated secrecy,
though secrecy contained a thrill. Then, one morning when she was