Henderson dryly, "are so darned cute and knowin' that when an old fellow cuts in ahead of 'em for once, he likes to hug the joke to himself a while before he springs it."  There was no acid in his tone. He was beaming very benignantly down upon the little blond stenographer.  "You say that Mrs. Mack is absent-minded-like and dreamy, and that young T. A. acts like he'd swallowed an electric battery. Well, when it comes to that, I've seen you many a time, when you didn't know any one was lookin', just sitting there at your typewriter, with your hands kind of poised halfway, and your lips sort of parted, and your eyes just gazing away somewhere off in the distance for fifteen minutes at a stretch. And out there in the shipping-room Henry's singing like a whole minstrel troupe all day long, when he isn't whistlin' so loud you can hear him over 's far as Eighth Avenue."  Then, as the red surged up through the girl's fair skin, "Well?" drawled old Pop Henderson, and the dry chuckle threatened again.  "We-e-ell?" 

 "Why, Pop Henderson!" exploded Miss Kelly from her cage. "Why—Pop—Henderson!" 

 In those six words the brisk and agile-minded Miss Kelly expressed the surprise and the awed conviction of the office staff. 

 Pop Henderson trotted over to the water-cooler, drew a brimming glass, drank it off, and gave vent to a great exhaust of breath. He tried not to strut as he crossed back to his desk, climbed his stool, adjusted his eye-shade, and, with a last throaty chuckle, plunged into his books again. 

 But his words already were working their wonders. The office, after the first shock, was flooded with a new atmosphere—a subtle, pervasive air of hushed happiness, of tender solicitude. It went about like a mother who has found her child asleep at play, and who steals away atiptoe, finger on lip, lips smiling tenderly. 

 The delicate antennae of Emma McChesney's mind sensed the change. 

 Perhaps she read something in the glowing eyes of her sister-in-love, Hortense. Perhaps she caught a new tone in Miss Kelly's voice or the forewoman's. Perhaps a whisper from the outer office reached her desk. The very afternoon of Pop Henderson's electrifying speech, Mrs. McChesney crossed to T. A. Buck's office, shut the door after her, lowered her voice discreetly, and said, 

 "T. A., they're on." 

 "What makes you think so?" 

 

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