tual amazement and was baptized by
the tears that their merriment squeezed from their eyes.

"I am not laughing at Tasper Britt," he gasped, checking his hilarity.
"I would not laugh at any man who falls in love with you, Vona. I am
laughing at the idea of Tasper Britt writing poetry. Let me look out
of the window! Has Burkett Hill tipped over? Has the sun turned in the
heavens at high noon and started back to the east?"

"What does it mean?" she asked. Her expression excused the banality of
her query; her eyes told him that she knew, but her ears awaited his
indorsement of her woman's conviction.

He pointed to the big calendar on the wall. "It's a valentine," he said,
gravely. But the twinkle reappeared in his eyes when he added, "And
valentines have always been used for prefaces in the volume of Love."

She did not reflect any of his amusement. She clasped her hands and
gazed down on them, and her forehead was wrinkled with honest distress.

"Of course, you have sort of been guessing," he ventured. "All the
renovating process--the way he has been tiptoeing around and squinting
at you!"

She looked up suddenly and caught his gaze; his tone had been hard, but
his eyes were tender.

Then it happened!

They had been hiding their deeper feelings under the thin coating
of comradeship for a long time. As in the instance of other pent-up
explosives, only the right kind of a jar was needed to "trip" the mass.

The threat of a rival--even of such a preposterous rival as Tasper
Britt--served as detonator in the case of Frank Vaniman, and the
explosion of his emotions produced sympathetic results in the girl
across the table from him. He leaped up, strode around to her and put
out his arms, and she rushed into the embrace he offered.

But their mutual consolations were denied them--he was obliged to dam
back his choking speech and she her blessed tears.

A depositor came stamping in.

They were calm, with their customary check on emotions, when they were
free to talk after the man had gone away.

"Vona, I did not mean to speak out to you so soon," he told her. "Not
but what it was in here"--he patted his breast--"and fairly boiling all
the time!"

She assured him, with a timid look, that her own emotions had not been
different from his.

"But I have respected your obligations," he went on, with earnest
candor. "And this is the first real job I've ever had. It's best to be
honest with each other."

She agreed