ee of the office suspected that anything lay beneath
the surface reasons given for changing firms. She accepted the
handsome farewell gift with as much apparent pleasure as if she
were to be married and it were a start toward her silver chest. Mary,
too, had learned how to pretend. Nor did she permit Steve to come
snarling--masculine fashion of sobbing--at her in vain protests
trying to shake her from her resolve.

During the last days of rushed work to help her successor find the way
comparatively easy Mary kept Steve at arm's length. The same strange
joy at having told him her secret and released the tension was being
relived again in knowing that she was to leave the tangle with the
Gorgeous Girl in command of it, and go live her commercial nun's
existence in the offices of unromantic old graybeards who merely
thought of her as a mighty clever woman who would not demand an
assistant.

Mary felt that she had truly passed her commercial novitiate; she made
herself admit that a commercial life was hers for all time. She would
leave a forbidden world of romance, watching Luke become a six-footer
and an embryo inventor as her special pride and pleasure. It was good
to have it settled, to have it a scar, pale and calm, throbbing only
under extreme pressure. She even welcomed Beatrice's hurried visit to
the office and met with gentle patience her half-veiled reproaches for
leaving her husband's employ.

"I can't see why you go," Beatrice protested, undecided whether it was
because Steve and Mary had come to some understanding, as Trudy
hinted, and it would be wiser for Mary to be removed from the everyday
scene of action; or whether Mary had never thought of Steve except as
a man who would not pay her such and such a salary and therefore,
being tailor-made of heart as well as dress, she coolly picked up her
pad and pencil and was walking off the lot. With the complacent
conceit of all Gorgeous Girls who fancy that clothes can always
conquer, Beatrice really inclined toward the latter theory. But being
a woman she could not resist having a few pangs of unrest and trying
out her fancied detective ability upon Mary.

She brought her a farewell gift also--a veil case which had been given
to Beatrice two summers ago. A fresh ribbon had made it quite all
right, so she acted the Lady Bountiful as she presented her offering
and listened carefully to Mary's sensible reply.

"I can't go running off to Bermuda and Florida like y