off on the night
mail, he would have felt that he could detain her, but not for
anything personal. Miss Doane was an expert legal stenographer, and
she knew her value. The slightest delay in dispatching office
business annoyed her. Letters that were not signed until the next
morning awoke her deepest contempt. She was scrupulous in
professional etiquette, and Wanning felt that their relations,
though pleasant, were scarcely cordial.

As Miss Doane's trim figure disappeared through the outer door,
little Annie Wooley, the copyist, came in from the stenographers'
room. Her hat was pinned over one ear, and she was scrambling into
her coat as she came, holding her gloves in her teeth and her
battered handbag in the fist that was already through a sleeve.

"Annie, I wanted to dictate a letter. You were just leaving, weren't
you?"

"Oh, I don't mind!" she answered cheerfully, and pulling off her old
coat, threw it on a chair. "I'll get my book."

She followed him into his room and sat down by a table,--though she
wrote with her book on her knee.

Wanning had several times kept her after office hours to take his
private letters for him, and she had always been good-natured about
it. On each occasion, when he gave her a dollar to get her dinner,
she protested, laughing, and saying that she could never eat so much
as that.

She seemed a happy sort of little creature, didn't pout when she was
scolded, and giggled about her own mistakes in spelling. She was
plump and undersized, always dodging under the elbows of taller
people and clattering about on high heels, much run over. She had
bright black eyes and fuzzy black hair in which, despite Miss
Doane's reprimands, she often stuck her pencil. She was the girl who
couldn't believe that Wanning was fifty, and he had liked her ever
since he overheard that conversation.

Tilting back his chair--he never assumed this position when he
dictated to Miss Doane--Wanning began: "To Mr. D. E. Brown, South
Forks, Wyoming."

He shaded his eyes with his hand and talked off a long letter to
this man who would be sorry that his mortal frame was breaking up.
He recalled to him certain fine months they had spent together on
the Wind River when they were young men, and said he sometimes
wished that like D. E. Brown, he had claimed his freedom in a big
country where the wheels did not grind a man as hard as they did in
New York. He had spent all these years hustling about and getting
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