arent unconsciousness of his astonishment.

"You'll have to leave on the early train," she agreed, "and--and so I
won't see you again."

She turned her back upon him for a moment. He realized that she was
fumbling inside the throat of the little, too-tight blouse. When she
faced him again there was something in the palm of her outstretched
hand.

"I've been waiting for you to come tonight," she went on, "and it was
hard waiting. That's why I tore the paper up, I think. And now, will
you--will you give him this for me--give it to him when he has won?
You won't have to say anything." She hesitated. "I--I think he'll
understand!"

Old Jerry reached out and took it from her--a bit of a red silk bow,
dotted with silver spangles. He gazed at it a moment before he tucked
it away in an inside pocket, and in that moment of respite his brain
raced madly.

"Of course I figured on goin'," he said, when his breath returned,
"but I been a little undecided--jest a trifle! But I ought to be
there; he might be a mite anxious if they wasn't somebody from home.
And I'll give it to him then--I'll give it to him when he's won!"

He went a bit unsteadily back to his waiting buggy.

"She had that all ready to give me," he said to himself as he climbed
up to the high seat. Tentatively his fingers touched the little lump
that the spangly bow of red made inside his coat. "She's had it all
ready for me--mebby for days! But how'd she know I was a-goin'?" he
asked himself. "How'd _she_ know, when I didn't know myself?"

He gave it up as a feminine whimsicality too deep for mere male
wisdom. Once on the way back he thought of the route that would go
mailless the next day.

"'Twon't hurt 'em none to wait a day or so," he stated, and his voice
was just a little tinged with importance. "Maybe it'll do 'em good.
And there ain't no way out of it, anyhow--for I surely got to be
there!"

CHAPTER XVIII

Morehouse did not hear the door in the opaque glass partition that
walled his desk off from the outer editorial offices open and close,
for all that it was very quiet. Ever since the hour which followed the
going to press of the afternoon edition of the paper the huge room,
with its littered floor and flat-topped tables, had been deserted, so
still that the buzzing of a blue-bottle fly against the window pane at
Morehouse's side seemed irritatingly loud by contrast.

The plump newspaperman in brown was too deeply preoccupied to hear