iently, her twilight eyes glancing now at
Beatrice and back again at Steve.

Outside the hum of commerce played the proper accompaniment to Steve
O'Valley's orders and Mary's thoughts and Beatrice's actions--a
jangling yet accurate rhythm of typewriters and adding machines and
office chatter, pencil sharpeners, windows being opened, shades
adjusted, wastebaskets dragged into position, boys demanding their
telegrams or delivering the same, phone bells ringing, voices asking
for Mr. O'Valley and being told that he was not in, other voices
asking for Miss Faithful and being told she was not at liberty just
now--would they be seated? Trudy's giggle rose above the hum at odd
intervals, elevators crept up and down, and outside the spring air
escorted the odour of hides and tallow and what not, grease and
machine oil and general junk from across the courtyard; trucks rumbled
on the cobblestones while workingmen laughed and quarrelled--a
confusing symphony of the business world. While Steve hurriedly gave
his orders Mary Faithful in almost the panoramic fashion of the
drowning swiftly recalled the incidents of Steve's life and of the
Gorgeous Girl's and her own as well, forcing herself mechanically to
say yes and no in answer to his questions and to make an occasional
notation.

[Illustration: "The Gorgeous Girl had never known anything but the most
gorgeous side of life"]

The panorama rather bewildered her; it was like being asked to
describe a blizzard while still in it, whereas one should be sitting
in a warm, cheery room looking impersonally at the storm swirl.

First of all, she thought of Steve O'Valley's Irish grandfather, by
like name, who spent his life in Virginia City trying to find a claim
equal to the Comstock lode, dying penniless but with a prospector's
optimism that had he been permitted to live _manana_ surely would have
seen the turning of the tide. Old O'Valley's only son and his son's
wife survived him until their ability to borrow was at an end and work
would have been their only alternative. So they left a small,
black-haired, blue-eyed young man named Stephen O'Valley to battle
single-handed with the world and bring honour to his name.

The first twelve years of the battle were spent in an orphanage in the
Grass Valley, the next four as a chore boy on a ranch, after which the
young man decided with naive determination that in order to obtain
anything at all worth while he must be fully prepared to