you like me?--that man at the
'phone just now, for instance?"

"There isn't anybody else. I don't know anybody I like well enough to
marry. For that matter, I don't think I am a marrying woman. Office
work seems to spoil one for that."

Daylight ran his eyes over her, from her face to the tip of a bronze
slipper, in a way that made the color mantle in her cheeks. At the
same time he shook his head sceptically.

"It strikes me that you're the most marryingest woman that ever made a
man sit up and take notice. And now another question. You see, I've
just got to locate the lay of the land. Is there anybody you like as
much as you like me?"

But Dede had herself well in hand.

"That's unfair," she said. "And if you stop and consider, you will
find that you are doing the very thing you disclaimed--namely, nagging.
I refuse to answer any more of your questions. Let us talk about other
things. How is Bob?"

Half an hour later, whirling along through the rain on Telegraph Avenue
toward Oakland, Daylight smoked one of his brown-paper cigarettes and
reviewed what had taken place. It was not at all bad, was his summing
up, though there was much about it that was baffling. There was that
liking him the more she knew him and at the same time wanting to marry
him less. That was a puzzler.

But the fact that she had refused him carried with it a certain
elation. In refusing him she had refused his thirty million dollars.
That was going some for a ninety dollar-a-month stenographer who had
known better ties. She wasn't after money, that was patent. Every
woman he had encountered had seemed willing to swallow him down for the
sake of his money. Why, he had doubled his fortune, made fifteen
millions, since the day she first came to work for him, and behold, any
willingness to marry him she might have possessed had diminished as his
money had increased.

"Gosh!" he muttered. "If I clean up a hundred million on this land
deal she won't even be on speaking terms with me."

But he could not smile the thing away. It remained to baffle him, that
enigmatic statement of hers that she could more easily have married the
Elam Harnish fresh from the Klondike than the present Elam Harnish.
Well, he concluded, the thing to do was for him to become more like
that old-time Daylight who had come down out of the North to try his
luck at the bigger game. But that was impossible. He could not set
back the flight of time. Wishi