Part 17

"Emma McChesney, when you talk like that, so coolly, so evenly, so--so darned mentally, I sometimes wonder if you really----"

"Don't say it, T. A. Because you don't mean it. I've had to fight for most of my happiness. I've never before found it ready at hand. I've always had to dig for it with a shovel and a spade and a pickax, and then blast. I had almost twenty years of that--from the time I was eighteen until I was thirty-eight. It taught me to take my happiness seriously and my troubles lightly." She shut her eyes for a moment, and her voice was very low and very deep and very vibrant. "So, when I'm coolest and evenest and most mental, T. A., you may know that I've struck gold."

A great glow illumined Buck's fine eyes. He took two quick steps in her direction. But Emma McChesney, one hand on the door-knob, warned him off with the other.

"Hey--wait a minute!" pleaded Buck.

"Can't. I've a fitting at the tailor's at three-thirty--my new suit. Wait till you see it!"

"The dickens you have! But so have I"--he jerked out his watch--"at three-thirty! It's the suit I'm going to wear when I travel as a blushing bridegroom."

"So's mine. And look here, T. A.! We can't both leave this place for a fitting. It's absurd. If this keeps on, it will break up the business. We'll have to get married one at a time--or, at least, get our trousseaux one at a time. What's your suit?"

"Sort of brown."

"Brown? So's mine! Good heavens, T. A., we'll look like a minstrel troupe!"

Buck sighed resignedly.

"If I telephone my tailor that I can't make it until four-thirty, will you promise to be back by that time?"

"Yes; but remember, if your bride appears in a skirt that sags in the back or a coat that bunches across the shoulders, the crime will lie at your door."

So it was that the lynx-eyed office staff began to wonder if, after all, Pop Henderson was the wizard that he had claimed to be.

During working hours, Mrs. McChesney held rigidly to business. Her handsome partner tried bravely to follow her example. If he failed occasionally, perhaps Emma McChesney was not so displeased as she pretended to be. A business discussion, deeply interesting to both, was likely to run thus:

Buck, entering her office briskly, papers in hand: "Mrs. McChesney--ahem!--I have here a letter from Singer & French, Columbus, Ohio. They ask for an extension. They've had 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 degradation of that marriage she had emerged triumphantly, sweet and unsullied, and she had succeeded in bringing her son, Jock McChesney, out into the clear sunlight with her.

The evenings spent with T. A. Buck, the man of fine instincts, of breeding, of proven worth, of rare tenderness, filled her with a great peace and happiness. When doubts assailed her, it was not for herself but for him. Sometimes the fear would clutch her as they sat before the fire in the sitting-room of her comfortable little apartment. She would voice those fears for the very joy of having them stilled.

"T. A., this is too much happiness. I'm--I'm afraid. After all, you're a young man, though you are a bit older than I in actual years. But men of your age marry girls of eighteen. You're handsome. And you've brains, family, breeding, money. Any girl in New York would be glad to marry you--those tall, slim, exquisite young girls. Young! And well bred, and poised and fresh and sweet and lovable. You see them every day on Fifth Avenue, exquisitely dressed, entirely desirable. They make me feel--old--old and battered. I've sold goods on the road. I've fought and worked and struggled. And it has left its mark. I did it for the boy, God bless him! And I'm glad I did it. But it put me out of the class of that girl you see on----"