Front offices resemble back kitchens in this: they have always an ear at the keyhole, an eye at the crack, a nose in the air. But

between the ordinary front office and the front office of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company there was a difference. The employees at Buck\'s—from Emil, the errand boy, to old Pop Henderson, who had started as errand boy himself twenty-five years before—possessed the quality of loyalty. They were loyal to the memory of old man Buck, because they had loved and respected him. They were loyal to Mrs. Emma McChesney, because she was Mrs. Emma McChesney (which amounts to the same reason). They were loyal to T. A. Buck, because he was his father\'s son.

For three weeks the front office had been bewildered. From bewilderment it passed to worry. A worried, bewildered front office is not an efficient front office. Ever since Mrs. McChesney had come off the road, at the death of old T. A. Buck, to assume the secretaryship of the company which she had served faithfully for ten years, she had set an example for the entire establishment. She was the pacemaker. Every day of her life she figuratively pressed the electric button that set the wheels to whirring. At nine A.M., sharp, she appeared, erect, brisk, alert, vibrating energy. Usually, the office staff had not yet swung into its gait. In a desultory way, it had been getting into its sateen sleevelets, adjusting its eye-shades, uncovering its typewriter, opening its ledgers, bringing out its files. Then, down the hall, would come the sound of a firm, light, buoyant step. An electric thrill would pass through the front office. Then the sunny, sincere, "Good morning!"

"\'Morning, Mrs. McChesney!" the front office would chorus back.

The day had begun for the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company.

Hortense, the blond stenographer (engaged to the shipping-clerk), noticed it first. The psychology of that is interesting. Hortense knew that by nine-thirty Mrs. McChesney\'s desk would be clear and that the buzzer would summon her. Hortense didn\'t mind taking dictation from T. A. Buck, though his method was hesitating and jerky, and he was likely to employ quite casually a baffling and unaccustomed word, over which Hortense\'s scampering pencil would pause, struggle desperately, then race on. Hortense often was in for a quick, furtive session with her pocket-dictionary after one of T. A.\'s periods. But with Mrs. McChesney, dictation was a joy. She knew what she wanted to say and she always said it. The words she used were short, clean-cut, meaningful Anglo-Saxon words. She never used received when she could use got. Hers was the rapid-fire-gun method, each word sharp, well timed, efficient.

Imagine, then, Hortense staring wide-eyed and puzzled at a floundering, hesitating, absent-minded Mrs. McChesney—a Mrs. McChesney strangely starry as to eyes, strangely dreamy as to mood, decidedly deficient as to dictation. Imagine a Hortense with pencil poised in air a full five minutes, waiting until Mrs. McChesney should come to herself with a start, frown, smile vaguely, pass a hand over her eyes, and say, "Let me see—where was I?"

"\'And we find, on referring to your order, that the goods you mention——\'" Hortense would prompt patiently.

"Oh, yes, of course," with an effort. Hortense was beginning to grow alarmed.

In T. A. Buck\'s office, just across the hall, the change was quite as noticeable, but in another way. His leisurely drawl was gone. His deliberate manner was replaced by a brisk, quick-thinking, quick-speaking one. His words were brief and to the point. He seemed to be riding on the crest of an excitement-wave. And, as he dictated, he smiled.

Hortense stood it for a week. Then she unburdened herself to Miss Kelly, the assistant bookkeeper. Miss Kelly evinced no surprise at her disclosures.

"I was just talking about it to Pop yesterday. She acts worried, doesn\'t she? And yet, not exactly worried, either. Do you suppose it can be that son of hers—what\'s his name? Jock."

Hortense shook her head.

"No; he\'s all right. She had a letter from him yesterday. He\'s got a grand position in Chicago, and he\'s going to marry that girl he was so stuck on here. And it isn\'t that, either, because Mrs. McChesney likes her. I can tell by the way she talks about her. I ought to know. Look how Henry\'s ma acted toward me when we were first engaged!"

The front office buzzed with it. It crept into the workroom—into the shipping-room. It penetrated the frowsy head of Jake, the elevator-man. As the days went on and the tempo of the front office slackened with that of the two bright little inner offices, only one member of the whole staff remained unmoved, incurious, taciturn. Pop Henderson listened, one scant old eyebrow raised knowingly, a whimsical half-smile screwing up his wrinkled face.

At the end of three weeks, Hortense, with that display of temperament so often encountered in young ladies of her profession, announced in desperation that, if this thing kept on, she was going to forget herself and jeopardize her position by demanding to know outright what the trouble was.

From the direction of Pop Henderson\'s inky retreat, there came the sound of a dry chuckle. Pop Henderson had been chuckling in just that way for three weeks, now. It was getting on the nerves of his colleagues.

"If you ever spring the joke that\'s kept you giggling for a month," snapped Hortense, "it\'ll break up the office."

Pop Henderson removed his eye-shade very deliberately, passed his thin, cramped old hand over his scant gray locks to his bald spot, climbed down stiffly from his stool, ambled to the center of the room, and, head cocked like a knowing old brown sparrow, regarded the pert Hortense over his spectacles and under his spectacles and, finally, through his spectacles.

"Young folks now \'days," began Pop Henderson dryly, "are so darned cute and knowin\' that when an old fellow cuts in ahead of \'em for once, he likes to hug the joke to himself a while before he springs it." There was no acid in his tone. He was beaming very benignantly down upon the little blond stenographer. "You say that Mrs. Mack is absent-minded-like and dreamy, and that young T. A. acts like he\'d swallowed an electric battery. Well, when it comes to that, I\'ve seen you many a time, when you didn\'t know any one was lookin\', just sitting there at your typewriter, with your hands kind of poised halfway, and your lips sort of parted, and your eyes just gazing away somewhere off in the distance for fifteen minutes at a stretch. And out there in the shipping-room Henry\'s singing like a whole minstrel troupe all day long, when he isn\'t whistlin\' so loud you can hear him over \'s far as Eighth Avenue." Then, as the red surged up through the girl\'s fair skin, "Well?" drawled old Pop Henderson, and the dry chuckle threatened again. "We-e-ell?"

"Why, Pop Henderson!" exploded Miss Kelly from her cage. "Why—Pop—Henderson!"

In those six words the brisk and agile-minded Miss Kelly expressed the surprise and the awed conviction of the office staff.

Pop Henderson trotted over to the water-cooler, drew a brimming glass, drank it off, and gave vent to a great exhaust of breath. He tried not to strut as he crossed back to his desk, climbed his stool, adjusted his eye-shade, and, with a last throaty chuckle, plunged into his books again.

But his words already were working their wonders. The office, after the first shock, was flooded with a new atmosphere—a subtle, pervasive air of hushed happiness, of tender solicitude. It went about like a mother who has found her child asleep at play, and who steals away atiptoe, finger on lip, lips smiling tenderly.

The delicate antennae of Emma McChesney\'s mind sensed the change.

Perhaps she read something in the glowing eyes of her sister-in-love, Hortense. Perhaps she caught a new tone in Miss Kelly\'s voice or the forewoman\'s. Perhaps a whisper from the outer office reached her desk. The very afternoon of Pop Henderson\'s electrifying speech, Mrs. McChesney crossed to T. A. Buck\'s office, shut the door after her, lowered her voice discreetly, and said,

"T. A., they\'re on."

"What makes you think so?"

"Nothing. That is, nothing definite. No man-reason. Just a woman-reason."

T. A. Buck strolled over to her, smiling.

"I haven\'t known you all this time without having learned that that\'s reason enough. And if they really do know, I\'m glad."

"But we didn\'t want them to know. Not yet—until—until just before the——"

T. A. Buck laid his hands lightly on Emma McChesney\'s shoulders. Emma McChesney promptly reached up and removed them.

"There you are!" exclaimed Buck, and rammed the offending hands into his pockets.

"That\'s why I\'m glad they know—if they really do know. I\'m no actor. I\'m a skirt-and-lingerie manufacturer. For the last six weeks, instead of being allowed to look at you with the expression that a man naturally wears when he\'s looking at the woman he\'s going to marry, what have I had to do? Glare, that\'s what! Scowl! Act like a captain of finance when I\'ve felt like a Romeo! I\'ve had to be dry, terse, businesslike, when I was bursting with adjectives that had nothing to do with business. You\'ve avoided my office as you would a small-pox camp. You\'ve greeted me with a what-can-I-do-for-you air when I\'ve dared to invade yours. You couldn\'t have been less cordial to a book agent. If it weren\'t for those two hours you grant me in the evening, I\'d—I\'d blow up with a loud report, that\'s what. I\'d——"

"Now, now, T. A.!" interrupted Emma McChesney soothingly, and patted one gesticulating arm. "It has been a bit of a strain—for both of us. But, you know, we agreed it would be best this way. We\'ve ten days more to go. Let\'s stick it out as we\'ve begun. It has been best for us, for the office, for the business. The next time you find yourself choked up with a stock of fancy adjectives, write a sonnet to me. Work \'em off that way."

T. A. Buck stood silent a moment, regarding her with a concentration that would have unnerved a woman less poised.

"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——"

"Yes, Emma; you\'re not at all in the class with that girl you see every day on Fifth Avenue. Fifth Avenue\'s full of her—hundreds of her, thousands of her. Perhaps, five years ago, before I had worked side by side with you, I might have been attracted by that girl you see every day on Fifth Avenue. You don\'t see a procession of Emma McChesneys every day on Fifth Avenue—not by a long shot! Why? Because there\'s only one of her. She doesn\'t come in dozen lots. I know that that girl you see every day on Fifth Avenue is all that I deserve. But, by some heaven-sent miracle, I\'m to have this Emma McChesney woman! I don\'t know how it came to be true. I don\'t deserve it. But it is true, and that\'s enough for me."

Emma McChesney would look up at him, eyes wet, mouth smiling.

"T. A., you\'re balm and myrrh and incense and meat and drink to me. I wish I had words to tell you what I\'m thinking now. But I haven\'t. So I\'ll just cover it up. We both know it\'s there. And I\'ll tell you that you make love like a \'movie\' hero. Yes, you do! Better than a \'movie\' hero, because, in the films, the heroine always has to turn to face the camera, which makes it necessary for him to make love down the back of her neck."

But T. A. Buck was unsmiling.

"Don\'t trifle,............