“Say,” he broke forth almost impetuously after his hesitation, “I wish you wouldn't call me Mr. Temple Barholm.”
“D-do you?” she fluttered. “But what could I call you?”
“Well,” he answered, reddening a shade or so, “I'd give a house and lot if you could just call me Tem.”
“But it would sound so unbecoming, so familiar,” she protested.
“That's just what I'm asking for,” he said—“some one to be familiar with. I'm the familiar kind. That's what's the matter with me. I'd be familiar with Pearson, but he wouldn't let me. I'd frighten him half to death. He'd think that he wasn't doing his duty and earning his wages, and that somehow he'd get fired some day without a character.”
He drew nearer to her and coaxed.
“Couldn't you do it?” he asked almost as though he were asking a favor of a girl. “Just Tem? I believe that would come easier to you than T. T. I get fonder and fonder of you every day, Miss Alicia, honest Injun. And I'd be so grateful to you if you'd just be that unbecomingly familiar.”
He looked honestly in earnest; and if he grew fonder and fonder of her, she without doubt had, in the face of everything, given her whole heart to him.
“Might I call you Temple—to begin with?” she asked. “It touches me so to think of your asking me. I will begin at once. Thank you—Temple,” with a faint gasp. “I might try the other a little later.”
It was only a few evenings later that he told her about the flats in Harlem. He had sent to New York for a large bundle of newspapers, and when he opened them he read aloud an advertisement, and showed her a picture of a large building given up entirely to “flats.”