"He will be there less frequently in future. And now is there nothing I can do? Are you sure you have everything you need at home?"
"More than I need,"—very much more, she could have added to herself, thinking of her many unbidden lodgers,—"but you haven't given me your name, and I owe you so much—besides the fifteen cents." She was trying to smile now.
"You owe me nothing, unless——" he was turning away, but something in her sweet, earnest face drew him back,—"unless it be permission to call and ask how you are after all this excitement."
Miss Wallen's face clouded. Where could she receive him? Were not every nook and corner of the house except her own little room given over to the use of occupants in whom this distinguished-looking gentleman could be expected to feel no interest whatever? He saw the hesitation, and spoke at once.
"I beg your pardon," said he, frankly and heartily. "I had no right whatever to be intrusive. Good-night, and—better luck next time." With that he was into the cab and off in a trice.
Two days afterwards Miss Wallen called at the Beaulieu on her way down town, clambered to the fourth floor, and asked her friends the name of the gentleman who occupied the left front room, ground-floor. They said he was a Mr. Forrest, but he'd gone away—he was often away; from which she decided him to be one of the knights errant of the commercial world, but vastly unlike in tone and manner those who usually accosted her. Two weeks afterwards, as she was seated at her desk in the big office building, while her friend Miss Bonner was clicking away at the opposite window, the door opened, and in came an elderly lawyer for whom she had done many a page of accurate work. "Miss Wallen," said he, "can you do some quick copying for a friend of mine? Let me present Lieutenant Forrest, of the regular army."
