She had come hurrying round a pillar when she all but ran into Laurie. He had been talking in low tones and laughing in notes quite as low. To her great surprise she saw that the person he was talking to was none other than the perfectly beautiful Miss Bruce, the head of the section.
“And to think,” Lucile said to herself, “he actually appeared to be joking her about something! And he a sales-person! Ah well, our chief is a star—would have been a star on any stage, and a star has a right to be friendly with any member of the cast.”
“Well,” she smiled to herself, “I know now who could tell me all about Laurie Seymour; but I’d never dare ask. Never! I’ll have to find out some other way.”
One impression coming from this incident bore down heavily upon her. Laurie Seymour was a young man with a past broader than the four walls of the juvenile book section. Just what that past might have been, she could not guess.
“Perhaps,” she told herself, “he is some artist getting pictures from life; or an actor gathering local color for a play, or—”
“Is your table in order?” It was Rennie who broke in upon her meditations.
It wasn’t, so she hurried away to forget, for the time being, Laurie Seymour and her perplexing problems.
CHAPTER VII
CORDIE’S MAD FLIGHT
“Cordie, there’s something I should tell you.”
Cordie looked up from the book she was reading, stared at Lucile for a moment, then with a toss of her pretty head exclaimed: “If you should, why don’t you?”