ed up
and saw her coming in from the kitchen, and saw her eyes go to what he
had in his hand, and saw the start she gave before she hurried to take
the paper away.

"My gracious! My work--" she said agitatedly, when she had the papers in
her hand. She went to her desk, looking perturbed, and gave a quick,
seeking glance at the scattered papers there; then at Starr.

"Did any more--?"

"That's all," Starr said gravely. "It was the wind when I opened the
door, caught them."

"My own carelessness. I don't know why I left my desk open," she said.
And while he stood looking at her, she pulled down the roll-top with a
slam, still visibly perturbed.

It was strange, he thought, that she should have a roll-top desk out
here, anyway. He had seen it the other time he was at the house, and it
had struck him then as queer, though he had not given it more than a
passing thought.

As a matter of fact, it was not queer. Johnny Calvert had dilated on the
destructiveness of rats, "pack rats" he called them. They would chew
paper all to bits, he said. So Helen May, being finicky about having her
papers chewed, had brought along this mouse-proof desk with her other
furniture from Los Angeles.

Her perturbed manner, too, was the result of a finicky distaste for
having any disorder in her papers, especially when it was work intrusted
to her professionally. She never talked about the work she did for
people, and she always kept it away from the eyes of those not concerned
in it. That, she considered, was professional etiquette. She had strained
a point when she had read a little of the manuscript to Vic. Vic was just
a kid, and he was her brother, and he wouldn't understand what she read
any more than would the horned toad down by the spring. But Starr was
different, and she felt that she had been terribly careless and
unprofessional, leaving the manuscript where pages could blow around the
room. What if a page had blown outside and got lost!

Starr had turned his back and was staring out of the window. He might
have been staring at a blank wall, for all he saw through the glass. He
was as pale as though he had just received some great physical shock, and
he had his hands doubled up into fists, so that his knuckles were white.
His eyes were almost gray instead of hazel, and they were hard and
hurt-looking.

Something in the set of his head and in the way his shoulders had
stiffened told Helen May that things had gone wrong just i