e he escaped for the evening. "Come in and bother
the life out of me. Come in every half-hour," he would say. When she did
come in he would crow and chuckle, "Nope. I refuse to be tempted yet; I
am a busy man. But maybe I'll give you those verbal jewels of great
price on your next visitation, oh thou in the vocative--some Latin
scholar, eh? Keep it up, kid; good work. Maybe you'll keep me from being
fired."

Usually he gave her the dictation before he went. But not always. And
once he disappeared for four days--on a drunk, everybody said, in
excited office gossip.

During Babson's desertion the managing editor called Una in and
demanded, "Did Mr. Babson give you some copy about the Manning Wind
Shield? No? Will you take a look in his desk for his notes about it?"

While Una was fumbling for the notes she did not expect to find, she
went through all the agony of the little shawled foreign wife for the
husband who has been arrested.

"I've got to help you!" she said to _his_ desk, to his bag of Bull
Durham, to his alarm-clock--even to a rather shocking collection of
pictures of chorus-girls and diaphanously-clad dancers which was pasted
inside the double drawer on the right side of the desk. In her great
surge of emotion, she noticed these posturing hussies far less than she
did a little volume of Rosetti, or the overshoes whose worn toes
suddenly revealed to her that Walter Babson, the editor, was not
rich--was not, perhaps, so very much better paid than herself.

She did not find the notes. She had to go to the managing editor,
trembling, all her good little heart wild with pain. The editor's brows
made a V at her report, and he grunted, "Well--"

For two days, till Walter Babson returned, she never failed to look up
when the outer door of the office opened.

She found herself immensely interested in trying to discover, from her
low plane as copyist, just what sort of a position Walter Babson
occupied up among the select souls. Nor was it very difficult. The
editor's stenographer may not appreciate all the subtleties of his wit,
and the refinements of his manner may leave her cold, but she does hear
things, she hears the Big Chief's complaints.

Una discovered that the owner and the managing editor did not regard
Walter Babson as a permanent prop of the institution; that they would
keep him, at his present salary of twenty-five dollars a week, only till
some one happened in who would do the same work for less m