nt.

"Mr. Farron cannot see you."

Cleverer people than Burke had struggled vainly against the poison of
inferiority which this tone instilled into their minds.

"That's what they keep telling me down-town. I never knew him sick
before."

"No?"

"It wouldn't take five minutes."

"Mr. Farron is too weak to see you."

Marty made a strange grating sound in his throat, and Adelaide asked
like a queen bending from the throne:

"What seems to be the matter, Burke?"

"Why,"--Burke turned upon her the flare of his light, fierce eyes,--"they
have it on me on the dock that as soon as he comes back he means to
bounce me."

"To bounce you," repeated Adelaide, and she almost smiled as she thought
of that poor exhausted figure up-stairs.

"I don't care if he does or not," Marty went on. "I'm not so damned stuck
on the job. There's others."

"There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far," murmured Adelaide.

Again he scowled, feeling the approach of something hostile to him.

"What's that?" he asked, surmising that she was insulting him.

"I said I supposed you could get a better job if you tried."

He did not like this tone either.

"Well, whether I could or not," he said, "this is no way. I'm losing my
hold of my men."

"Oh, I can't imagine your doing that, Burke."

He turned on her to see if she were really daring to laugh at him, and
met an eye as steady as his own.

"I guess I'm wasting my time here," he said, and something intimated that
some one would pay for that expenditure.

"Shall I take a message to Mr. Farron for you?" said Adelaide.

He nodded.

"Yes. Tell him that if I'm to go, I'll go to-day."

"I see." She rose slowly, as if in response to a vague, amusing caprice.
"Just that. If you go, you'll go to-day."

For the first time Burke, regaining his self-confidence, saw that she was
not an enemy, but an appreciative spectator, and his face broke up in a
smile, queer, crooked, wrinkled, but brilliant.

"I guess you'll get it about right," he said, and no compliment had ever
pleased Adelaide half so much.

"I think so," she confidently answered, and then at the door she
turned. "Oh, Mrs. Baxter," she said, "this is Marty Burke, a very
important person."

Importance, especially Adelaide Farron's idea of importance, was a
category for which Mrs. Baxter had the highest esteem, so almost against
her will she looked at Burke, and found him looking her over with such a
shrewd eye that sh