ninety days." 

 "That's enough. That firm's slow pay, and always will be until old Singer has the good taste and common sense to retire. It isn't because the stock doesn't move. Singer simply believes in not paying for anything until he has to. If I were you, I'd write him that this is a business house, not a charitable institution—— No, don't do that. It isn't politic. But you know what I mean." 

 "H'm; yes."  A silence.  "Emma, that's a fiendishly becoming gown." 

 "Now, T. A.!" 

 "But it is!  It—it's so kind of loose, and yet clinging, and those white collar-and-cuff things——" 

 "T. A. Buck, I've worn this thing down to the office every day for a month. It shines in the back. Besides, you promised not to——" 

 "Oh, darn it all, Emma, I'm human, you know! How do you suppose I can stand here and look at you and not——" 

 Emma McChesney (pressing the buzzer that summons Hortense): "You know, Tim, I don't exactly hate you this morning, either. But business is business. Stop looking at me like that!"  Then, to Hortense, in the doorway:  "Just take this letter, Miss Stotz-Singer & French, Columbus, Ohio. Dear Sirs:  Yours of the tenth at hand. Period. Regarding your request for further extension we wish to say that, in view of the fact——" 

 T. A. Buck, half resentful, half amused, wholly admiring, would disappear. But Hortense, eyes demurely cast down at her notebook, was not deceived. 

 "Say," she confided to Miss Kelly, "they think they've got me fooled. But I'm wise. Don't I know? When Henry passes through the office here, from the shipping-room, he looks at me just as cool and indifferent. Before we announced it, we had you all guessing, didn't we? But I can see something back of that look that the rest of you can't get. Well, when Mr. Buck looks at her, I can see the same thing in his eyes. Say, when it comes to seeing the love-light through the fog, I'm there with the spy-glass." 

 If Emma McChesney held herself well in leash during the busy day, she relished her happiness none the less when she could allow herself the full savor of it. When a girl of eighteen she had married a man of the sort that must put whisky into his stomach before the machinery of his day would take up its creaking round. 

 Out of the 

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