John had often looked up from his desk to the rim of it, wishing he could hypnotize it to grow suddenly taller and press its streaky buff boards against the whitewashed ceiling. Mac's voice paused, there was a snap as he put a new cylinder on his machine, and the dictation began again. The building was permeated by a musty odor of leather, for the offices adjoined the factory. This was not the saddle and harness store in which John had gone to work twenty years before. Five years after that first summer, Mr. Banks had sold the store and become a partner in an already established business, supplying leather goods to the industries. Collins, Bolton & Banks owned their own tanneries down the river; their hides were bought chiefly in Alsace and Savoy, or at the monthly auctions in Paris, by their agent. In their factory they turned out leather belting, gaskets, and other leather articles used in factories and for railroad equipment.

Marklin sat down and pushed the buzzer on his desk. A machine on the other side of the partition was silenced, and Miss Platt opened the door.

"Good morning, sir," she said. Miss Platt's voice was muted, and under her high, narrow forehead, of a dull white like parchment, her mouth and chin were both so small that they seemed compressed. John had often wondered what bitterness had cauterized her spirit so early and left her rigid within.

"Good morning," he said. "Is Mr. Hunter in the office?"

"He went to Schenectady yesterday to see a belt they're installing in a new factory. He said he might go on to Fonda, if he got word that Nevinson Brothers had received their last order. He was going to telephone from Schenectady."

"If he comes in to-day, will you tell him I'd like to see him? It's about that billiard-ball concern I wrote to yesterday." When the door closed behind her, John wondered if she had been in the room, and if the voice he had heard coming from his lips had been his own. He raked the morning's mail toward him like a pile of dead leaves. As he did so, his eye fell on the photograph standing in a silver frame across the blotter. It was a picture of Marian sitting in a carved, highbacked Florentine chair, with Dorothy at

her side, taken when their daughter was seven years old. Marian was wearing a low gown of black velvet, from which her shoulders emerged like mellowed ivory. Her head was carried high, and the thick blond hair reflected a tawny light over her features. Marian had always loved dignity. She held the centre of the picture as surely as a knife thrust in wood. By her side Dorothy's slim dark head was a flash of something foreign, subordinate to her mother, yet independent. Marian did not gaze down at the child with the consciously maternal expression of many women being photographed with their children; her eyes swept the space in front of her and met the observer's with calm. Whatever you might say of Marian, she was not sentimental. And her dignity was instinctive. She loved solid things, like velvet or marble or an unimpeachable position in the community. Well, he had given her the chance to maintain her dignity. He had removed from her environment all that was bare or cheap. He had made her happiness the anvil of his life, and in the manner of those who live through the organization of their environment, she was happy. She had furnished their home as she wished it, she belonged to clubs, she managed charities, she headed committees for the relief of foreign peoples. . . . His hands straightened the pile of letters, while his eyes rested on the face in the picture. The past, which he had seen for a moment that morning in Dorothy's eyes, had struck chords of desire deep within him. His soul hungered. The papers cut his fingers like nettles; the walls about him exuded an odor of leather. Usually he savored that rich smell, but to-day it was sickening.

The telegram on the top of the pile was from Mears, the Pittsburgh salesman, and was disagreeable. Mears always was.

"Trial order 172-M Alleghany Electric not yet received," it read. "Have you shipped? Competition here stiff. Our efforts in the field useless without cooperation home office. Mears."

John looked past the yellow sheet of paper at his desk. But the desk stretched itself out and out, as in retreating mirrors, until it reached twenty years into the past, a narrowing streak, at the end of which he saw a boy lying on his back un

der Grandfather Blessing's orchard. And the boy had become Dorothy.

Suddenly anger shook his fingers, and he crunched the telegram into a ball. "As if we didn't co-operate!" he exclaimed. "The damned insolence!"

If Mears had entered the office at that moment, John would perhaps have gone at his throat. His brooding eyes, which had grown impenetrable during years in the office, were suddenly naked with anguish. "Co-operation!" he repeated. His mind clung to the single word, as to an unbearable insult. He threw the crumpled telegram in the direction of the waste-basket and watched it disappear under the radiator beneath the window.

He knew that Mears had been working three years to get this concern and that the trial order in question was critical. The company was one of the most important in the Pittsburgh territory; its business would amount to many thousands each month. John had frequently received telegrams of this kind in the past, and had laughed at the readiness of salesmen to cry disaster. But this morning he hated Mears. He recalled how Mears's voice raked his nerves when they argued. It would be a source of satisfaction to ignore the telegram. If shipment on the order had been neglected, as Mears claimed, perhaps the customer would slip through his fingers.

John rang for Miss Platt and began dictating letters on other subjects. There was that question of establishing an office in Buffalo: he wanted a report from the local banks on Arthur Michens, who had come to see him about taking the agency. . . . Of course, if Mears should lose the customer . . . Then there was a memorandum to be dictated to the advertising manager concerning the new experiments in tensile strength made on their Hercules Belting. . . . It was quite possible that Mears might lose him. John knew that he would not stay in his present job after an act of such disloyalty. Well, Samson had dragged down the pillars at his death. After Miss Platt had gone, he sat chin in hand, staring at the picture of Marian. At noon he did not go out. Miss Platt came in once for help on a sentence in her notes which she could not read. He had forgotten what he had dictated and told her something else.

In the middle of the afternoon he pushed his chair back, walked slowly toward the window, and groped on the floor under the radiator.

IV

"CIGARETTE, dear?" Marian held out, that same evening, the box of beaten silver in which she kept her own brand. "Thanks." John put down his coffeecup.

"We're going to have Olga Terehov, who used to be with the Metropolitan, sing at the Woman's Club in May," Marian continued, "for the benefit of the Near East Relief." Her dress of silvery green flowed down her body and shimmered in the glow of an open fire like the leaves of an olive-tree. Jade earrings lay against her neck with creamy softness. The March day, which had dawned balmy, had chilled and the log fire was welcome. Dorothy lay propped up on one elbow on the rug before the fireplace.

"Yes?" said John. His face was drawn, the lines under his eyes marked. Marian noted the lifelessness of his voice, and scrutinized his face.

"Have you had a hard day in the office?" she asked.

John stood up. "Nothing unusual," he answered. "Mears, in Pittsburgh, landed a big customer he had been angling for ever since he went out there."

Good for him. The company grows all the time, doesn't it?"

"More or less." arette in the fire. coming?"

John threw his cig"When is Terehov

"The twenty-second of May. I had a letter this morning from her manager. He said she had to be in Cleveland the twenty-fifth." Marian was leaning back in her chair, smoking her cigarette. The jade earrings had gone to sleep on the smooth channel of her neck. Her fingers clasped the slender ivory holder of the cigarette lightly, but with the incisiveness with which she endowed all her acts. It was the same Marian, brought to maturity, who had once walked with him beneath the rows of maples, where the leaves were cut from metal by the light of the street lamps. He watched the shadows on her clear face.

"For the sake of the Near East, I sup