e gets reasonable. His fight is
only an old notion about the independents sticking on. Sawmills are in
our way these days. Flagg is done, anyway. He ought to be saved from
himself. I'm after Latisan. He's ready to fight and to ruin Flagg,"
declared Mr. Craig, with a fine assumption of righteous desire to aid a
fallen foe, "just to carry out his grudge against me--using Flagg's
property as his tool. It'll be too bad. So get busy, Miss Elsham--and
keep him busy--off the drive."

"Read on, Chief," she implored Mern. "I'm seeing as quick as this just
how I'll do it."

The conference continued.

When Miss Elsham departed she stopped in the main office on her way out.
"Good-by, girls! I'm off for the big sticks. I'll bring each of you a
tree."

She went to a mirror, taking out her vanity case. Beside the mirror were
hooks for hats and outer garments. "Perfect dream!" she commented,
examining a hat. "Whose?"

"Mine," said Miss Leigh.

Miss Elsham took the hat in admiring hands, dislodging a green toque,
which fell upon the floor. She did not notice the mishap to the toque
and left it where it had fallen. She touched up her countenance and went
away.

"Your hat is on the floor," Miss Leigh informed Miss Kennard. The girl
did not reply; she was looking down upon the keys of her typewriter, and
her demeanor suggested that her heart was on the floor, too.

When Lida sat by the open window of her room that evening her depression
had become doleful to the point of despair.

The night was unseasonably warm with enervating humidity; in that
atmosphere the dormant germs of the girl's general disgust with the
metropolis and all its affairs were incubated. Breathing the heavy air
which sulked at the window, she pondered on the hale refreshment of the
northern forests. But it seemed to her that there was no honesty in the
woods any more. That day, fate searching her out at last, she had been
dragged in as a party in a plot against her stricken grandfather. She
indulged her repugnance to her employment; it had become hateful beyond
all endurance. Her association with the cynical business of the agency
and her knowledge of the ethics of Mern had been undermining the
foundations of her own innate sense of what was inherently right, she
reflected, taking account of stock.

Dispassionately considered, it was not right for her to use her acquired
knowledge of the plot against Echford Flagg in order to circumvent the
plans of an em