" he explained.

She looked perplexed.

"Shall I wait five minutes?"

"Yes," she answered, as he thrust the box into her hands.

That box worried her all the afternoon. Not having a chance to open
it, she hid it beneath her desk, where it distracted her thoughts
until evening. Of course she could not open it on the Elevated, so it
lay in her lap, still further to distract her thoughts on the way
home. It seemed certain that a two-dollar bill could not occupy all
that space.

She did not wait even to remove her hat before opening it in her room.
She found a little envelope containing her two-dollar bill nestling in
five dollars' worth of roses.

It was about as foolish a thing as she had ever known a man to do.

She placed the flowers on the table when she had her supper. All night
long they filled the room with their fragrance.

CHAPTER VIII

A MAN OF AFFAIRS

When, with some eighteen dollars in his pocket, Don on Sunday ordered
Nora to prepare for him on that day and during the following week a
breakfast of toast, eggs, and coffee, he felt very much a man of
affairs. He was paying for his own sustenance, and with the first
money he had ever earned. He drew from his pocket a ten-dollar bill, a
five-dollar bill, a two-dollar bill, and some loose change.

"Pick out what you need," he ordered, as he held the money toward
her.

"I don't know how much it will be, sir. I'll ask the cook, sir."

"Very well; ask the cook. About dinners--I think I'd better wait until
I see how I'm coming out. Dinners don't matter so much, any way,
because they come after I'm through work."

Don ate his breakfast in the dining-room before the open fire, as his
father used to do. In smoking-jacket and slippered feet, he enjoyed
this as a rare luxury--even this matter of breakfasting at home, which
until now had been merely a negative detail of routine.

When he had finished he drew his chair closer to the flames and
lighted a cigarette. He had been cutting down on cigarettes. He had
always bought them by the hundred; he was now buying them by the box.
Until this week he never realized that they represented money. He was
paying now twenty-five cents for a box of ten; and twenty-five cents,
as he had learned in the restaurant in the alley, was a sum of money
with tremendous possibilities. It would buy, for one thing, five egg
sandwiches; and five egg sandwiches would keep a man from being
uncomfortably hungry a good many