McCormack's
voice as he had sung "Just a little love, a li-ttle ki-iss," had driven
her frantic.

She turned out her light and opened her bedroom window. The phonograph
across the court was going again. But now, evidently, its master had
come back from Pittsburgh, for it was singing lustily, "That's why I
wish again that I was in Michigan, back on the farm."

Rose smiled her old wide smile, and cuddled her cheek into the pillow.
She was the happiest person in the world.

When he called her up the next morning, she asked him to come down to
the premises of Dane & Company (it was a loft on lower Fifth Avenue)
about noon and go out to lunch with her, and she made no secret of her
motive in selecting their rendezvous. "I'd like to have you see what our
place is like;" she said, "though it isn't like anything much just now,
between seasons this way. Still you can get an idea."

He said he would be immensely interested to see the place, and from the
cadence of his voice was apparently prepared to let the conversation end
there. But she prolonged it a little.

"Do you hear from--Chicago while you're down here, Roddy?" she asked.
"Whether everything's all right--at home, I mean?"

It was a second or two before he answered, but when he did, his voice
was perfectly steady.

"Yes," he said. "I get a night-letter every morning from Miss French.
(This was Mrs. Ruston's successor.) It's--everything's all right."

"Good-by, then, till noon," she said. And if he could have seen the
smile that was on her lips, and the brightness that was in her eyes as
she said it ...!

It was a part, you see, of his Quixotic determination to make no claims,
that he had not said a word, during his evening call, about the
twins--her babies!

On the stroke of twelve his card was brought to her, and she went out
into their bare little waiting-room to meet him.

"We aren't a regular dressmaking establishment, you see," she said. "The
people we have to impress aren't the ones we make the clothes for. So we
can be as shabby down here as we please, and Alice says--Alice Perosini,
you know--that our shabbiness really does impress them. Shows we don't
care what they think.

"You're sure you've plenty of time to see around in?" she went on. "That
it won't cut into your time for lunch?"

He made it plain that he had plenty of time, and she took him into her
own studio, a big north-lighted room at the back of the building, with
the painter's manik