The cashier thrust his hands into his pockets and grinned.
“I suppose she gave you a receipt for the notes.”
“No. One doesn’t ask Miss Dameron for receipts,” replied the cashier. “I’d have given her all the government bonds in the vault if she had asked for them.”
“You speak as though you were sorry she hadn’t.”
“I guess the old man has met his match,” said the cashier. “Miss Dameron has struck up an intimacy with her cousin, Olive Merriam, whose mother owes E. Dameron, Esquire, money. When E.’s daughter heard the money was to be collected she told him it was no good and pulled him off. And being a bright young woman she came around herself for the notes. She’s on to the old man like a million of brick.”
“Well,” said the president, conservatively, “he’s an old customer of ours. We must not lose him.”
“That would be a real loss,” said the cashier. “The daughter comes in once a week to cash a check, and I couldn’t bear to part with that. The sight of her coming in in that sweepy, on-wings-from-heaven way of hers lifts my spirit like a cocktail.”
“You have it bad,” said the president. “If you’re going to that clearing-house meeting you’d better skip.”
Zelda locked the mortgage and notes in her own desk, with no intention of giving them to her father, unless he should demand them. When he came home in the evening he seemed to be lost in meditation, and after a silent meal he studied his papers while Zelda sat and read.
She had no longer the consolation of the open fire, which, though an ugly thing of coal, had nevertheless made many of the winter evenings tolerable. The open windows now admitted the street noises, and the cries of the neighborhood children at play stole into the room. There was something stifling in her life; she felt sometimes that she could not breathe. She sat for long with a book in her hands, but with her eyes upon the wall; and, as she was thus lost in her thoughts, she was aware suddenly that her father’s eyes were bent upon her.