“I suppose it slipped his mind,” Bruce answered drily. “You’ll give me your address and let me come to-morrow?”
“Will you mind coming early—at nine in the morning?”
“Mind! I’ll be sitting on the steps at sunrise if you say so,” Bruce answered heartily.
How young she looked—how like the little girl of the picture when she laughed! Bruce looked at his watch as he returned to his party to see how many hours it would be before nine in the morning.
The shabbiness of the hotel where Helen lived surprised him. It was worse than his own. She had looked so exceptionally well-dressed the previous evening he had supposed that what she called ruin was comparative affluence, for Bruce had not yet learned that clothes are unsafe standards by which to judge the resources of city folks, just as on the plains and in the mountains faded overalls and a ragged shirt are equally untrustworthy guides to a man’s financial rating. And the musty odor that met him in the gloomy hallway—he felt how she must loathe it. He had wondered at the early hour she’d set but when Helen came down she quickly explained.
“I must leave here at half past and if you have not finished what you have to say I thought you might walk with me to the office.”
“The office?” It shocked him that she should have to go to an office, that she had hours, that anybody should have a claim upon her time by paying for it.
Quizzically: