“Oh, that’s your ambition is it? Well, good luck attend you, my young Napoleon. I should have chosen Wellington, if I had been you. Good-night. I am waiting for my daughter, to whom I foolishly gave permission to call for me here in a cab.”
Marsten held the hand extended to him so long that the manager looked at him in astonishment. The colour had mounted from the young man’s cheeks to his brow and his eyes were on the floor.
“Mr. Sartwell,” he said, with an effort, “I came tonight to speak with you about your daughter and not about the strike.”
The manager dropped his hand as if it had been red-hot, and stepped back two paces.
“About my daughter?” he cried, sternly. “What do you mean?”
Marsten had to moisten his lips once or twice before he could reply. His released hand opened and shut nervously.
“I mean,” he said, “that I am in love with her.”
The manager sat down in the office chair beside his table. All the former friendliness had left his face, and his dark brows lowered over his keen eyes, into which their usual cold glitter had returned.
“What folly is this?” he cried, with rising anger. “You are a boy, and from the gutter at that, for all I know. My daughter is but a child yet; she is only——” He paused. He had been about to say seventeen when it occurred to him that he had married her mother when she was but a year older.
Marsten’s colour became a deeper red when the manager spoke so contemptuously of the gutter. He said slowly, and with a certain doggedness in his tone: