rfully. "I rather like doing it myself. I
just want to talk to Ellen."

It was a bewildered and rather scandalized Castle who conveyed the
message to Ellen.

CHAPTER VII

"I wish you'd stop whistling that thing," said Miss Boyd, irritably. "It
makes me low in my mind."

"Sorry," said Willy Cameron. "I do it because I'm low in my mind."

"What are you low about?" Miss Boyd had turned toward the rear of the
counter, where a mirror was pasted to a card above a box of chewing gum,
and was carefully adjusting her hair net. "Lady friend turned you down?"

Willy Cameron glanced at her.

"I'm low because I haven't got a lady friend, Miss Boyd." He held up
a sheet of prescription paper and squinted at it. "Also because
the medical profession writes with its feet, apparently. I've done
everything to this but dip it in acid. I've had it pinned to the wall,
and tried glancing at it as I went past. Sometimes you can surprise them
that way. But it does no good. I'm going to take it home and dream on
it, like bride's cake."

"They're awful, aren't they?"

"When I get into the Legislature," said Willy Cameron, "I'm going to
have a bill passed compelling doctors to use typewriters. Take this now.
Read upside down, its horse liniment. Read right side up, it's poison.
And it's for internal use."

"What d'you mean you haven't got a lady friend?"

"The exact and cruel truth." He smiled at her, and had Miss Boyd been
more discerning she might have seen that the smile was slightly forced.
Also that his eyes were somewhat sunken in his head. Which might, of
course, have been due to too much political economy and history, and
the eminent divines on Sunday evenings. Miss Boyd, however, was not
discerning, and moreover, she was summoning her courage to a certain
point.

"Why don't you ask me to go to the movies some night?" she said. "I like
the movies, and I get sick of going alone."

"My dear child," observed Willy Cameron, "if that young man in the sack
suit who comes in to see you every day were three inches shorter and
twenty pounds lighter, I'd ask you this minute."

"Oh, him!" said Miss Boyd, with a self-conscious smile. "I'm through
with him. He's a Bolshevik!"

"He has the Bolshevist possessive eye," agreed Willy Cameron, readily.
"Does he know you are through with him? Because that's important, too.
You may know it, and I may know it, but if he doesn't know it--"

"Why don't you say right out you don't want to