"Not good-bye, I trust?" He retained the hand, despising himself
inexpressibly.
"Oh, we'll be in again, won't we Angie?"
"Oh, yes, indeed."
"My land, Angie! What do you think? I'd almost forgotten to pay for the
soda?"
"Please don't speak of it, Miss Lockwood--the pleasure--."
"But I must, Mr. Duncan. How much is it?"
Josie fingered the contents of her purse expectantly, but Duncan hung
in the wind. He had no least notion what might be the price of soda
water. "Two for a quarter?" he hazarded with his disarming grin.
Angle choked with appreciation of this exquisite sally. "Ain't you
funny!"
"I'm afraid you're right," he conceded; "still I'd rather you didn't
think so."
"It's ten cents, isn't it, Mr. Duncan?"
Josie was offering him a dime; he accepted it without question.
"Thank you, very much," said he. "Good afternoon, ladies."
He was aware of Angle's fluttering farewells on the sidewalk. Josie was
lingering on the doorstep in an agony of untrained coquetry. He lowered
his tone for her benefit, thereby adding new weight to his bombardment
of her amateur defences.
"Remember you promised to call again."
Her giggles tore his ear-drums. "Th-thank you, I'm sure," she
stammered, and fled.
They disappeared. He wandered to the chair and threw himself limply
into it. "That voice!" he said stupidly. "That giggle! I've got to woo
and win... _that!_...
"It serves me right," he concluded.
The most hopeless of humours assailed him, and he yielded to it without
a struggle. His attitude expressed his mood with relentless verity.
Chin sunken upon his breast, eyes fairly distilling gloom, legs
stretched out carelessly before him, he sat motionless, suffocating at
the bottom of a gulf of discontent. His lips moved, sometimes
noiselessly, again in whispers barely audible.
"Years of this!... A matter of human endurance--no, superhuman!... If
it wasn't for the bargain, I'd chuck it all and...
"Well, the only way to forget your misery is to work, I suppose."
He pulled himself together and stood up, wondering where he had left
his broom, and simultaneously stiffened with surprise, aware that he
was not alone. A glance, however, established the connection between
the rear door, which stood ajar, and the young woman who stood staring
at him in utterest stupefaction. This, he thought, must be the woman of
the voice, upstairs.
But she couldn't be Graham's wife. She was too young. Even beneath the
mask of care and weariness, the all too plain evidences of privation,
spiritual and mental as well as physical, that Betty wore unceasingly
in those days, he could discern youth and grace and gentleness, and the
nascent promise of prettiness that longed to be, to have the chance to
show itself and claim its meed of deference and love. He was quick to
see the intelligence in her mutinous eyes, and the sweet lines of her
mouth, too often shaped in sullen mould, and no less quick to recognise
that she would carry herself well, with spirit and dignity, once she
were relieved of household toil and moil, once given the chance to
discard her shapeless, bedraggled and threadbare garments for those
dainty and beautiful things for which her starved heart must be sick
with longing....
"Good Lord!" he thought, pitiful, "it's worse here than I dreamed. Old
Graham must need a keeper--and this child has been trying to be that,
with nothing to keep him on."
"Who are you?" the girl demanded sullenly, in a voice a little harsh
and toneless. "What are you doing here? Where's my father?"
"Mr. Graham has stepped out on business," Duncan replied. "You are his
daughter, I believe?"
"Yes, I'm his daughter, but----"
"My name is Nathaniel Duncan. Mr. Graham has been kind enough to take
me on as apprentice, so to speak."
Her stare continued, intense, resentful, undeviating.
"You mean you're going to work here?"
"That my intention, Miss Graham." He nodded gravely.
"What for?"
"To learn the drug business."
"Oh-h!" She flung herself a pace away, impatiently. "I'm not a child,
and I don't want to be talked to like one."
"I didn't mean to annoy you----"
[Illustration: "You mean you're going to work here?"]
"Well, you do. You've got no business in a run-down place like this--
you with your fine clothes and your fine airs. You didn't come here to
learn the drug business; you know as well as I do you've got some other
motive."
There was a truth in that to sting him. He smarted under its lash, but
held his temper in check because he was sorry for the girl. "Perhaps
you're right," he conceded; "perhaps I have some other motive. But
that's neither here nor there. I'm here, and it is my present intention
to learn the drug business in your father's store."
"I don't believe you, Mister Duncan--or whatever your name is."
"I'm sorry," he said patiently.
Betty's lips twitched, contemptuous. "Well, saying you do mean to work
here----"
"I do."
"Where do you think your pay's going to come from?"
"Heaven, perhaps."
"I guess you think that's funny, don't you?"
"I confess, at the moment I did. But now I realise it's probably a
bitter truth."
He was too much for her, she saw, and the knowledge only served to fan
her indignation and suspicions.
"You're making a mistake," she snapped. "Father can't pay you nothing."
"He'll pay me all I'm worth," said Duncan meekly.
She glared at him an instant longer, then mute for lack of a
sufficiently scornful retort, turned and ran back up the steps,
slamming the door behind her.
Duncan drew a rueful face, contemplating the place where she had been.
"I didn't think this was going to be a bed of roses--and it isn't," he
concluded.
X