Part 14

"You'll have dinner with me to-night?" Emma asked. "Up at my apartment, all cozy?"

"Not to-night, dearie. I'll be in bed by eight. I'm not the girl I used to be. Time was when a New York buying-trip was a vacation. Now it's a chore."

She took Emma McChesney's hand and patted it.

"If you've got something real nice for dinner, though, and feel like company, why don't you ask--somebody else that's lonesome."

After which, Ethel Morrissey laughed her wickedest and waved a sudden good-by with a last word about seeing her to-morrow.

Emma McChesney, her color high, entered her office. It was five o'clock. She cleared her desk in half an hour, breathed a sigh of weariness, reached for hat and jacket, donned them, and, turning out her lights, closed her door behind her for the day. At that same instant, T. A. Buck slammed his own door and walked briskly down the hall. They met at the elevator.

They descended in silence. The street gained, they paused uncertainly.

"Won't you stay down and have dinner with me to-night, Emma?"

"Thanks so much, T. A. Not to-night."

"I'm--sorry."

"Good night."

"Good night."

She turned away. He stood there, in the busy street, looking irresolutely and not at all eagerly in the direction of his club, perhaps, or his hotel, or whatever shelter he sought after business hours. Something in his attitude--the loneliness of it, the uncertainty, the indecision--smote Emma McChesney with a great pang. She came swiftly back.

"I wish you'd come home to dinner with me. I don't know what Annie'll give us. Probably bread pudding. She does, when she's left to her own devices. But I--I wish you would." She looked up at him almost shyly.

T. A. Buck took Emma McChesney's arm in a rather unnecessarily firm grip and propelled her, surprised and protesting, in the direction of the nearest vacant taxi.

"But, T. A.! This is idiotic! Why take a cab to go home from the office on a--a week day?"

"In with you! Besides, I never have a chance to take one from the office on Sunday, do I? Does Annie always cook enough for two?"

Apparently Annie did. Annie was something of a witch, in her way. She whisked about, wrought certain changes, did things with asparagus and mayonnaise, lighted the rose-shaded table-candles. No one noticed that dinner was twenty minutes late.

Together they admired the great mahogany buffet that Emma had miraculously found space for in the little dining-room.

"It glows like a great, deep ruby, doesn't it?" she said proudly. "You should see Annie circle around it with the carpet-sweeper. She knows one bump would be followed by instant death."

Looking back on it, afterward, they remembered that the dinner was a very silent one. They did not notice their wordlessness at the time. Once, when the chops came on, Buck said absently,

"Oh, I had those for l----" Then he stopped abruptly.

Emma McChesney smiled.

"Your mother trained you well," she said.

The October night had grown cool. Annie had lighted a wood fire in the living-room.

"That was what attracted me to this apartment in the first place," Mrs. McChesney said, as they left the dining-room. "A fireplace--a practical, real, wood-burning fireplace in a New York apartment! I'd have signed the lease if the plaster had been falling in chunks and the bathtub had been zinc."

"That's because fireplaces mean home--in our minds," said Buck.

He sat looking into the heart of the glow. There fell another of those comfortable silences.