e of the salesman's time
in showing her what she had no intention of purchasing, before she
picked out Henry's vigorous step from the confusion of ordinary
footfalls in the aisle behind her. Though she had determined, a few
moments before, to punish him a little, she turned quickly.

"Sorry I'm late, Connie." That meant that it was no ordinary business
matter that had detained him; but there was nothing else noticeably
unusual in his tone.

"It's certainly your turn to be the tardy one," she admitted.

"I'd never take my turn if I could help it--particularly just after
being away; you know that."

She turned carelessly to the clerk. "I'll take that too,"--she
indicated the trinket which she had examined last. "Send it, please.
I've finished here now, Henry."

"I thought you didn't like that sort of thing." His glance had gone to
the bit of frippery in the clerk's hand.

"I don't," she confessed.

"Then don't buy it. She doesn't want that; don't send it," he directed
the salesman.

"Very well, sir."

Henry touched her arm and turned her away. She flushed a little, but
she was not displeased. Any of the other men whom she knew would have
wasted twenty dollars, as lightly as herself, rather than confess, "I
really didn't want anything more; I just didn't want to be seen
waiting." They would not have admitted--those other men--that such a
sum made the slightest difference to her or, by inference, to them; but
Henry was always willing to admit that there had been a time when money
meant much to him, and he gained respect thereby.

The tea room of such a department store as Field's offers to young
people opportunities for dining together without furnishing reason for
even innocently connecting their names too intimately, if a girl is not
seen there with the same man too often. There is something essentially
casual and unpremeditated about it--as though the man and the girl,
both shopping and both hungry, had just happened to meet and go to
lunch together. As Constance recently had drawn closer to Henry
Spearman in her thought, and particularly since she had been seriously
considering marrying him, she had clung deliberately to this unplanned
appearance about their meetings. She found something thrilling in this
casualness too. Spearman's bigness, which attracted eyes to him always
in a crowd, was merely the first and most obvious of the things which
kept attention on him; there were few women who, ha