u see, and they're just in
paper cambric and not the right colors."

What the man was struggling for--it had been his sole reason for
detaining her in the first place--was some sort of opening that would
make it seem natural to tell her he hoped her Christmas Day had not been
too intolerably unhappy; to shake hands with her and wish her
luck--assure her in one way or another, that she had in him a friend she
could bring her troubles to--any sort of troubles. He'd made up his mind
to do this when the Christmas rehearsal should he over, as long ago as
the night of their walk down the avenue. This resolution had been
reinforced by the look he had caught in her face when she came up to
rehearsal this afternoon--a rather misty, luminous, exalted look,--a
little lack of definition about her eyelids suggesting there had been
tears there.

This was good observation like her own of him. But, again like hers, in
its failure to get the central clue, it only mislead him, the worse. If
he could have guessed that she had been having a Christmas celebration
of her own that day; that there had been unwrapped and displayed, three
little presents she had bought the day before; one for her husband, and
one for each of her two babies, and that, just before starting for
rehearsal, she had wrapped them up and put them into her trunk to await
the day when they could be given, it might have altered matters
somewhat.

The thing that finally made it clearly impossible for Galbraith to
express anything at all of this feeling which he, in good faith, called
friendship for her, was her alternative offer--if he had time, to take
him up to her room for a look at the patterns.

If she's seen him as anything at all but starkly her employer and her
financier; if she's had the faintest glimmer of him as one who held for
her any personal feelings whatever, she never would have suggested as an
alternative to her bringing the patterns here to rehearsal, his coming
up to her room for a look at them.

The thing of all others that irritated Galbraith was the possession of a
divided mind. Just now, disappointed as he was, almost to the point of
pain, though he wouldn't acknowledge to himself that it went as far as
that, over the evident fact that his relation to the girl, in spite of
their partnership, was exactly what it had been from the beginning, he
was still aware that if he'd got the opening he wanted, had managed
another of those warm lithe hand-cl