blouse, showing her fat arms huskily? He shivered. Oh, for one of Miss Marilla’s nice thick blankets, and a hot-water bag! Oh, for the soft, warm bed, the quiet room, and Miss Marilla keeping guard! But he was a man—and a soldier! And every now and then would come Mary Amber’s keen accusing voice: “Is that man here yet? And you waiting on him!” It was that that kept him up when he might have given way. He must show her he was a man, after all. “That man!” What had she meant? Did she, then, suspect him of being a fraud and not the real nephew? Well—shiver, shiver—what did he care? Let Mary Amber go to thunder! Or, if she didn’t want to go, he would go to thunder himself. He felt himself there already.

[104]

Two hours went by. Now and then some one came in with a message, and[105] went out again. The girl behind the desk got out a pink sweater she was knitting, and chewed gum in time to her needles. Sometimes she eyed her companion curiously, but he did not stir nor look up. If there hadn’t been prohibition, she might have thought him drunk. She began to think about his message and weave a crude little romance around him. She wondered whether he had been wounded. If he had given her half a chance, she would have asked him questions; but he sat there with his head in his hands like a stone image, and never seemed to know she was in the room. After a while it got on her nerves; and she took up her telephone, and carried on a gallery conversation with a fellow laborer somewhere up the line, giggling a good deal and telling about a movie she went to the night before. She used rare slang, with a furtive glance at the soldier for[106] developments; but he did not stir. Finally she remarked loudly that it was getting noontime, and “so-longed” her friend, clicking the receiver into place.

[105]

[106]

“I gotta go to lunch now,” she remarked in an impersonal tone. “I have a hour off. This office is closed all noontime.”

He did not seem to hear her; so she repeated it, and Gage looked up with bloodshot, heavy eyes.

“What becomes of the message if it comes while you’re away?” he asked feverishly.

“Oh, it’ll be repeated,” she replied easily. “You c’n cumbback bime-by, ’bout two o’clock er later,’n’ mebbe it’ll be here. I gotta lock up now.”

Lyman Gage dragged himself to his feet, and looked dazedly about him; then he staggered out on 

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