s soon running into weeks.

Halcyon nights Queed enjoyed in the dining-room in Fifi's absence, yet
faintly marred in a most singular way by the very absence which alone
made them halcyon. It is a fact that you cannot give to any person
fifteen minutes of valuable time every night, and not have your
consciousness somewhat involved in that person's abrupt disappearance
from your horizon. Messages from Fifi on matters of most trivial import
came to Queed occasionally, and these served to keep alive his subtle
awareness of her absence. But he never took any notice of the messages,
not even of the one which said that he could look in and see her some
afternoon if he wanted to.

XI

_Concerning a Plan to make a Small Gift to a Fellow-Boarder, and
what it led to in the Way of Calls; also touching upon Mr. Queed's
Dismissal from the Post, and the Generous Resolve of the Young
Lady, Charles Weyland._

The State Department of Charities was a rudimentary affair in those
days, just as Queed had said. Its appropriation was impossibly meager,
even with the niggard's increase just wrung from the legislature. The
whole Department fitted cozily into a single room in the Capitol; it was
small as a South American army, this Department, consisting, indeed, of
but the two generals. But the Secretary and the Assistant Secretary
worked together like a team of horses. They had already done wonders,
and their hopes were high with still more wonders to perform. In
especial there was the reformatory. The legislature had adjourned
without paying any attention to the reformatory, exactly as it had been
meant to do. But a bill had been introduced, at all events, and the
_Post_ had carried a second editorial, expounding and urging the plan;
several papers in the smaller cities of the State had followed the
_Post's_ lead; and thus the issue had been fairly launched, with the
ground well broken for a successful campaign two years later.

The office of the Department was a ship-shape place, with its two desks,
a big one and a little one; the typewriter table; the rows and rows of
letter-files on shelves; a sectional bookcase containing Charities
reports from other States, with two shelves reserved for authoritative
books by such writers as Willoughby, Smathers, and Conant. Here,
doubtless, would some day stand the colossal work of Queed. At the big
desk sat the Rev. Mr. Dayne, a practical idealist of no common sort, a
k