"If you get a chance, I wish you would try to make things cheerful for him here."
"Of course," said Miss Summers, who understood Jonathan quite well.
"We've got to try that. We must make a little conspiracy to that end. I'll try to think up some details."
Miss Summers smiled as though she liked making little conspiracies with Jonathan. "Of course," she said again, and looked upon that as a promise.
Very quietly she set about keeping it. A little timidly, too; which was strange, since with others in the office and shop she was not in the least timid. She could do little, it is true—a cheery "Good morning" and a friendly nod at evening, an occasional smile when something brought David into her office, once in a long while a brief little chat in which she, with a breath-taking sense of having an adventure, took the lead. Another young man might have detected her friendliness and considered his charms. But David, though his grave courtesy never failed, neither thought of his charms nor was conscious of hers. Her charms, to be sure, were not of a striking sort; at least at first glance. She was a frail-looking body whose face was nearly always pale and sometimes, toward evening of a hot day, rather pinched; her arms were too slender to be pretty and the cords of her broad white neck stood out. She was not very tall and, perched on her stool at the tall old-fashioned desk by the window, she seemed more girlish even than her years, which were four-and-twenty. She did not look at all like an iris, even a white iris girl; David would almost as soon have suspected Miss Brown.
"I might," thought Miss Summers, "be a part of the furniture, for all he sees in me." She did not think it resentfully, though with an odd little twinge of disappointment. She regarded him as a very superior young man, the sort she had always wanted to know. But she had made a promise and she would not desert the conspiracy.
She noticed that he never ate or went out at the noon hour, as if there were no such thing as an inner man demanding attention. Thereafter her luncheon, which was always carried in a dainty little basket, was seasoned with a conviction of gross selfishness. And one day, after she had eaten, she went, basket in hand, to the door of David's little room.
"Mr. Quentin—" she began.
Instantly David was on his feet—one of his habits she liked so well; other men in the office did not have it. "Yes, Miss Summers?"
She held out the basket. In the bottom reposed two fat cookies and a big apple whose ruddy cheeks had a rival in hers at the moment.