asket of unanswered mail. He said:

"I've given you a sample of my style, now you give me a sample of
yours, and then I'll see if I can afford to keep you as a stenographer
instead of a wife."

She nodded, went to a typewriter in a corner of his office, and seated
herself at the musicless instrument. Her heart pit-a-patted as fast as
her fingers, but she drew up the letter in a handsome style while he
sat and stared at her and mused upon the strange radiance she brought
into the office in a kind of aureole.

He grew abruptly serious when Miss Gabus, his regular stenographer,
entered and stared at the interloper with amazement, comma,
suspicion, comma, and hostility, period. She murmured a very
rasping "I beg your pardon," and stepped out, as Marie Louise rose
from the writing-machine and brought him an extraordinarily
accurate version of his letter.

And now he had two women on his hands and one on his heart. He dared
not oust Miss Gabus for the sake of Miss Webling. He dared not show
his devotion to Marie Louise, though as a matter of fact it made him
glow like a lighthouse.

He put Mamise to work in the chief clerk's office. It was noted that
he made many more trips to that office than ever before. Instead of
pressing the buzzer for a boy or a stenographer, he usually came out
himself on all sorts of errands. His buzzer did not buzz, but the
gossip did.

Mamise was vaguely aware of it, and it distressed her till she grew
furious. She was so furious at Davidge for not being deft enough to
conceal his affection that she began to resent it as an offense and
not a compliment.

The impossible Mamise insisted on taking up her residence in one of
the shanties. When he took the liberty of urging her to live at a
hotel or at some of the more comfortable homes she snubbed him
bluntly. When he desperately urged her to take lunch or dinner with
him she drew herself up and mocked the virtuous scorn of a movie
stenographer and said:

"Sir! I may be only a poor typist, but no wicked capitalist shall loor
me to lunch with him. You'd probably drug the wine."

"Then will you--"

"No, I will not go motoring with you. How dare you!"

"May I call, then?"

More as a punishment than a hospitality, she said:

"Yessir--the fourteenth house on the left side of the road is me."

The days were still long and the dark tardy when he marched up the
street. It was a gantlet of eyes and whispers. He felt inane to an
imbecility. Th