and then she turned to the
assistant and said, gently, "I believe I should like _this_ book,
please," and paid for it and went out.

It was now almost on the stroke of six, and Erlcort said to his
assistant: "I'll close the store, Miss Pearsall. You needn't stay any
longer."

"All right, sir," the girl said, and went into the little closet at
the rear for her hat and coat. Did she contrive to get a copy of that
book under her coat as she passed the shelf where it lay?

When she was gone, he turned the key in the door and went back and sat
down before the fire dying on the hearth of the Franklin stove. It was
not a very cheerful moment with him, but he could not have said that
the day had been unprofitable, either spiritually or pecuniarily. In
its experiences it had been a varied day, and he had really sold a
good many books. More people than he could have expected had taken him
seriously and even intelligently. It is true that he had been somewhat
vexed by the sort of authority the president of the Intellectual Club
had shown in the way she swelled into the store and patronized him and
it, as if she had invented them both, and blamed him in a high, sweet
voice for having so many _old_ books. "My idea was that it would be a
place where one could come for the best of the _new_ books. But here!
Why, half of them I saw in June before I sailed!" She chided him
merrily, and she acted as if it were quite part of the joke when he
said that he did not think a good book could age much in four months.
She laughed patronizingly at his conceit of getting in the fall books
by Thanksgiving; but even for the humor of it she could not let him
say he should not do anything in holiday books. "I had expected to get
_all_ my Christmas books of you, Mr. Erlcort," she crowed, but for the
present she bought nothing. In compensation he recalled the gratitude,
almost humble gratitude, of a lady (she was a lady!) who had come that
day, bringing her daughter to get a book, any book in his stock, and
to thank him for his enterprise, which she had found worked perfectly
in the case of the book she had got the week before; the book had been
an unalloyed delight, and had left a sense of heightened self-respect
with her: that book of the dreadful episode.

He wished Margaret Green had been there; but she had been there only
once since his opening; he could not think why. He heard a rattling at
the door-latch, and he said before he turned to look,