ore slowly--"I've got something coming along pretty soon, where
there'll be scope for a young lady that can write shorthand _well_. I
can't tell you what it is, but it's something different from anything
there's ever been in this town; _and_ better."

His eyes masterfully held hers, seeming to say: "I'm vague. But I was
vague when I told you I'd see what could be done about your mother--and
look at what I did, and how quickly and easily I did it! When I'm vague,
it means a lot." And she entirely understood that his vagueness was
calculated--out of pride.

They talked about Mr. Dayson a little.

"I must go now," said Hilda awkwardly.

"I'd like you to take that Hugo," he said. "I dare say it would interest
you.... Remind you of old times."

"Oh no!"

"You can return it, when you like."

Her features became apologetic. She had too hastily assumed that he
wished to force a gift on her.

"Please!" he ejaculated. No abuse this time of moral authority! But an
appeal, boyish, wistful, supplicating. It was irresistible, completely
irresistible. It gave her an extraordinary sense of personal power.

He wrapped up the book for her in a sheet of blue "draft" paper that
noisily crackled. While he was doing so, a tiny part of her brain was,
as it were, automatically exploring a box of old books in the attic at
home and searching therein for a Gasc's French-English Dictionary which
she had used at school and never thought of since.

"My compliments to your mother," he said at parting.

She gazed at him questioningly.

"Oh! I was forgetting," he corrected himself, with an avuncular, ironic
smile. "You're not supposed to have seen me, are you?"

Then she was outside in the din; and from thrilling altitudes she had to
bring her mind to marketing. She hid under apples the flat blue parcel
in the basket.

CHAPTER VII
THE EDITORIAL SECRETARY

I

Arthur Dayson, though a very good shorthand writer, and not without
experience as a newspaper reporter and sub-editor, was a nincompoop.
There could be no other explanation of his bland, complacent
indifference as he sat poking at a coke stove one cold night of January,
1880, in full view of a most marvellous and ravishing spectacle. The
stove was in a room on the floor above the offices labelled as Mr. Q.
Karkeek's; its pipe, supported by wire stays, went straight up nearly to
the grimy ceiling, and then turned horizontally and disappeared through
a clumsy hole in the