two minutes." The
thought of what John Galbraith's disgust would be, in spite of his
good-natured assurance she needn't hurry, if she really kept him
waiting, set her at her task with flying fingers.

"There's no use hurrying," Olga commented on this burst of speed,
"because you're going to wait for me. This is my night. We'll have a
little table all by ourselves at Max's and then you'll come up and sleep
with me to-night."

An instinct prompted Rose to defer the necessary negative to this
suggestion until the last of the other girls, who was just then pinning
on her hat, should have gone. When the door clicked, she said she was
sorry but the plan couldn't be carried out.

Olga looked at her intensely. "I need you to-night," she said, "and if
you care anything about me at all you'll come."

"I'd come if I could," said Rose, "but it can't be managed. I've
promised to do something else."

Olga's face paled a little and her eyes burned. "So that's it, is it?"
she said furiously. "You're going out with Galbraith." She went on to
say more than that, but her meaning was plain at the first words.

Rose looked at her a little incredulous, quite cool, so far as her mind
went (because, of course, Olga's accusation was merely grotesque) but
curiously and most unpleasantly stirred, disgusted almost to the point
of nausea. She stopped the tirade, not because she cared what the girl
was saying, but because she couldn't stay in the room with a person
making that sort of an exhibition of herself. It took no more than half
a dozen words to accomplish this result. The mere fact that she spoke,
after that rather long blank period of speechlessness, and the cold
blaze of her blue eyes that accompanied her words, effected more than
the words themselves. And then, in a tempest of tears and
self-reproaches, Olga repented--a phase of the situation which was
worse, almost, than the former one, because it couldn't be dealt with
quite so summarily.

But Rose went on dressing as fast as she could all the while, and at
last, long before Olga had begun putting on her street clothes, she was
ready to go. With her hand on the door-latch she paused.

"I am going to have supper with Mr. Galbraith," she said. "He told me
there was something he wanted to talk to me about." And with that she
let herself out of the room, indifferent to the effect these last words
of hers might produce.

She caught sight of Galbraith down at the end of the corrido