ctation. But in that moment of her glance Daylight had
noted that her eyes were gray. He was later to learn that at times
there were golden lights in those same gray eyes; but he had seen
enough, as it was, to surprise him, for he became suddenly aware that
he had always taken her for a brunette with brown eyes, as a matter of
course.

"You were right, after all," he confessed, with a sheepish grin that
sat incongruously on his stern, Indian-like features.

Again he was rewarded by an upward glance and an acknowledging smile,
and this time he verified the fact that her eyes were gray.

"But it don't sound right, just the same," he complained. At this she
laughed outright.

"I beg your pardon," she hastened to make amends, and then spoiled it
by adding, "but you are so funny."

Daylight began to feel a slight awkwardness, and the sun would persist
in setting her hair a-smouldering.

"I didn't mean to be funny," he said.

"That was why I laughed. But it is right, and perfectly good grammar."

"All right," he sighed--"I shall meet you halfway in this
proposition--got that?" And the dictation went on. He discovered that
in the intervals, when she had nothing to do, she read books and
magazines, or worked on some sort of feminine fancy work.

Passing her desk, once, he picked up a volume of Kipling's poems and
glanced bepuzzled through the pages. "You like reading, Miss Mason?"
he said, laying the book down.

"Oh, yes," was her answer; "very much."

Another time it was a book of Wells', The Wheels of Change. "What's it
all about?" Daylight asked.

"Oh, it's just a novel, a love-story." She stopped, but he still stood
waiting, and she felt it incumbent to go on.

"It's about a little Cockney draper's assistant, who takes a vacation
on his bicycle, and falls in with a young girl very much above him.
Her mother is a popular writer and all that. And the situation is very
curious, and sad, too, and tragic. Would you care to read it?"

"Does he get her?" Daylight demanded.

"No; that's the point of it. He wasn't--"

"And he doesn't get her, and you've read all them pages, hundreds of
them, to find that out?" Daylight muttered in amazement.

Miss Mason was nettled as well as amused.

"But you read the mining and financial news by the hour," she retorted.

"But I sure get something out of that. It's business, and it's
different. I get money out of it. What do you get out of books?"

"Points of v