“Look here!” said Hardy, in an uncertain voice. “Can’t I come with you?”
“Oh, no!” cried she. “Oh, no! Oh, you’d better not!”
But they both knew that he was going with her, that he must, that the inevitable moment had come, the moment foreseen by both of them all through the winter.
“What’s the address?” he asked.
That was the last thing needed. Now he knew where the human, unofficial Miss Patterson lived. She was disassociated from business now. She was not a typist, but a girl.
She seemed aware of all this, for, as he got into the cab beside her, she looked at him in a new way—a look so bright, so clear, so gentle!
“Look here!” he said. “I—I don’t want to be a nuisance. If you’d really rather I didn’t come—”
She only shook her head. If she had tried to speak, she would have ended in tears.
He didn’t know that he, too, had a new look—that his young face had grown pale and strained, his eyes dark with his great fear and his great hope. And this was the splendid, vainglorious Mr. Hardy from the import department, the young man of whom great things were expected, who was to be made assistant buyer when Mr. Hallock left at the end of the year.
The other girls had talked about him a good deal, for he was a figure to capture[Pg 150] the imagination—a handsome boy, swaggering a little in the honest pride of his young manhood: only twenty-three, and going to be made assistant buyer!