them think we're
running after him. If he wants to see Irene, he can find out ways of
doing it for himself."

"Who wants him to see Irene?" retorted the Colonel angrily.

"I do," said Mrs. Lapham. "And I want him to see her without any of
your connivance, Silas. I'm not going to have it said that I put my
girls at anybody. Why don't you invite some of your other clerks?"

"He ain't just like the other clerks. He's going to take charge of a
part of the business. It's quite another thing."

"Oh, indeed!" said Mrs. Lapham vexatiously. "Then you ARE going to
take a partner."

"I shall ask him down if I choose!" returned the Colonel, disdaining
her insinuation.

His wife laughed with the fearlessness of a woman who knows her husband.

"But you won't choose when you've thought it over, Si." Then she
applied an emollient to his chafed surface. "Don't you suppose I feel
as you do about it? I know just how proud you are, and I'm not going to
have you do anything that will make you feel meeching afterward. You
just let things take their course. If he wants Irene, he's going to
find out some way of seeing her; and if he don't, all the plotting and
planning in the world isn't going to make him."

"Who's plotting?" again retorted the Colonel, shuddering at the
utterance of hopes and ambitions which a man hides with shame, but a
woman talks over as freely and coolly as if they were items of a
milliner's bill.

"Oh, not you!" exulted his wife. "I understand what you want. You
want to get this fellow, who is neither partner nor clerk, down here to
talk business with him. Well, now, you just talk business with him at
the office."

The only social attention which Lapham succeeded in offering Corey was
to take him in his buggy, now and then, for a spin out over the
Mill-dam. He kept the mare in town, and on a pleasant afternoon he
liked to knock off early, as he phrased it, and let the mare out a
little. Corey understood something about horses, though in a
passionless way, and he would have preferred to talk business when
obliged to talk horse. But he deferred to his business superior with
the sense of discipline which is innate in the apparently insubordinate
American nature. If Corey could hardly have helped feeling the social
difference between Lapham and himself, in his presence he silenced his
traditions, and showed him all the respect that he could have exacted
from any of his clerks. He talked horse w