“I thought we were all right. There aren’t any loose ends that I know of....”

Lewis had come to his office half an hour ahead of his usual time on Monday morning in order to prepare his secretary for Petra’s appearance there, which would be due, if she kept her word, a few minutes later.

“Certainly there are no loose ends. But that is just the trouble. You are so conscientious that you won’t let the sun go down—no, you won’t let it rise, and that is the point—on loose ends. You sit up nights over the work. I simply had to get you an assistant and this seemed the opportunity. By the way, and it’s very much by the way, did you do what I said and forget the manuscript over the week-end, or did you keep it right by you?”

Miss Frazier did not bother to answer. It was a foolish question. How could she have done what he wanted! His book was going to press in another month. At least, she and the publishers intended that it should. Naturally, she had worked on it over Saturday and Sunday, and she would continue to do that, if only Doctor Pryne kept his end up, until the thing was in print. But now she would not waste time in defending her industry, with this new girl due any minute.

“Who is she?” Miss Frazier asked. “Where did you find her?”

“It’s Petra Farwell. She needed a job so badly that I offered her this one without considering very much her qualifications.” He had to admit it. “She has no training but I believe she can typewrite a little. She has done some copying for her father. But whether she can spell or knows how to make out a check, or anything of the sort, I don’t know. I thought we’d put her in the reception office with the telephone and the patients. She has a nice clear voice and nice manners. That will relieve you of the part you like least. Isn’t it so?”

Petra Farwell! That was the girl, the daughter of the novelist Lowell Farwell, about whom they had been speaking here in the office only a few days ago. A young architect, a Mr. Richard Wilder, had made an appointment for the sole purpose of asking Doctor Pryne to psychoanalyze the novelist’s daughter, and he had taken fifteen minutes or more of Doctor Pryne’s time doing it. It was with some satisfaction Miss Frazier had already made a memorandum of the bill she was to send for that interview and obtained the doctor’s approval of it,—twenty-five dollars. Doctor Pryne had turned down the case, naturally, since he was not a psychoanalyst, and really, anyway, had time for only serious work; but Miss Frazier remembered that he had accepted an invitation to tea at the Farwell home in the country. And this was the result!

Miss Farwell had not sounded a very attractive person. And why should she, the daughter of Lowell Farwell and the stepdaughter of a very rich woman, need a job so badly that Doctor Pryne had engaged her without consulting his secretary, or assuring himself of her qualifications?

But Miss Frazier pulled herself up at this point in her reflections. She had no business letting herself remember anything that had been said about Miss Farwell in a professional fifteen minutes here in the doctor’s sanctum. Her standard for herself was to approximate her employer’s professional attitude as closely as possible—one part of the mind for confidences given professionally, and the other, quite separated and even uncolored by that special knowledge, for the social contact. So at this moment she did not show by so much as a lifted eyebrow that she had any intimate knowledge whatever of Miss Farwell’s character.

“And I’ve promised her,” the doctor was saying, “that between times, when there’s nothing in particular to do for you, she can study shorthand and practice typing. Please order the best textbooks for that, will you, Miss Frazier, this morning,—and a machine. Rent or buy the machine, whichever is more economical. And she will have to have a table for it in the reception office. You can get that while you are out at lunch.—After she gets going, she might take on some of the book. As I said, she has done copying for her father.”

The expression with which his secretary received this last remark, however, showed Lewis his stupid mistake. “I’m just talking through my hat,” he said quickly. “That is a hopeless idea, of course. But can you tell me how it is that you appear to be the only known human living who can make out my stuff, Miss Frazier?”

The girl averted her face. Her clear-cut, almost cameo profile kept its accustomed impersonal secretarial look, but her cheek was hot. Lewis saw the unaccustomed color and was annoyed with himself for his second stupidity in the minute.

She said, “It’s a sixth sense I have about your writing, I guess. It almost seems so, anyway. I am not so extraordinarily good about all illegible handwriting. But even the first day, yours was pretty clear to me. It surprises me myself.”

“Well, that is the best of luck for me,” Lewis murmured, and was grateful to hear a door opening and a step out in the reception office. “That must be Petra,” he exclaimed, and went out quickly.

He brought her in. But Miss Frazier, at the moment of Petra’s entrance, was blind to Petra’s bodily reality. It was rather the reflection of her on the doctor’s face that Miss Frazier saw and read as easily as she was accustomed to read his illegible script. “It has happened at last,” the thought sliced through her brain, clean, knifelike. And then, flowing through and over the wound, came the tides of her will, cooling the painful gash. “Nobody must guess that it matters.... It doesn’t matter.... It can’t matter....”

It was will, too, that jerked her attention from the doctor’s mirroring face, after that first second, to the girl herself. There she stood in a cool white frock with a violet-colored felt hat slouched Greta Garbo fashion over bright curls. She looked frightened. Why should she be frightened?

“Miss Frazier will initiate you,” the doctor’s voice was blurred and as far away as his face, washed over by the tides of Miss Frazier’s brave will. “You must ask her anything you need to know as it comes up, Petra. That is the simplest way, I suppose, to learn the ropes. And now I had better have a look at the mail.”—It was there, already sorted for him into piles on his desk, with Miss Frazier’s accustomed clarifying notes attached.

Miss Frazier took Petra, first, to the dressing room which now they must share. “This door goes into my private office,” she explained, “and this into the reception room, which will be in your charge. I’ll clear all my personal things out of the desk at once.”

When she had taken off her hat and powdered her face, Petra followed the secretary to the desk which was to be, miraculously, her very own, and they stood looking down on it together—both of them inarticulate and at a loss. “Perhaps the best way will be for you merely to stick around and notice how I answer the telephone to-day,” Miss Frazier decided, after a minute of cogitation. “One of your jobs, when you have caught on, will be to take down the names and addresses of the new patients, and file them here in this card drawer. Do you see? Whether the doctor accepts them as patients or not, we want the names and addresses, and the date that they telephoned or came. That is the only recording you will do out here. The rest I attend to, and it all goes into the files in the inner office. The most difficult thing to learn will be which calls to pass on to the doctor, though. I don’t myself quite see how he thinks you are going to begin learning that....”

Meanwhile Doctor Pryne, with his door shut, stood looking down at his desk, but not touching the letters. He intended to take Petra out to lunch with him in a few hours and explain to her—although he could never do that really, since he didn’t understand it himself—how he had ever been so stupidly forgetful as to mention Teresa’s name to Clare, after Petra’s warning him not to. Petra would forgive him. She must, of course. And then she would finish about Teresa. Or perhaps Teresa Kerr was living in Boston and would be in at the office this very day to see Petra. Or perhaps Petra would take him to see Teresa. In any case, Lewis’ interest in Teresa had increased, almost unreasonably, since Petra had broken off telling him about her, Saturday afternoon.

Now, in another second, he must start in on the day’s work, beginning with the top letter on the right-hand pile—the pile Miss Frazier had marked immediate. And when he did start in, he must put Petra out of his mind,—luncheon plans, interrupted confidences, and all. If he was not capable of putting Petra clean out of his mind and keeping her there for hours at a stretch, then the situation he had got himself into would be absurd and impossible. But he had offered her the job of his own impulse, and the fact that she had accepted it in a totally different spirit from what he had expected, had nothing to do with her right to keep it. It was hers, of course, just as long as she wanted it, although her reason for wanting it had become a mystery to him. So, he must—in half a second—clear his consciousness of her there just a few feet beyond his closed door—clear it clean as a whistle.

But as he prepared to make the effort, the telephone buzzed at his elbow. Petra’s voice came to him, clear, clipped, but a trifle unsteady. “Mrs. Joseph Duffield is calling you from New York, Doctor. Shall I put her through?”

Lewis mentally congratulated his secretary. She had got Petra started already. That was fine. It was Miss Frazier who had decided, of course, that this call was one he would certainly want to take, and now she was showing Petra how to put it through to him. But he foresaw the time, soon, when Petra, if she really was going to save Miss Frazier and be of use to her, must be left to discriminate for herself, and that was going to mean many mistakes. He frowned, rather, realizing that eventuality, as he said, “Yes, thanks. I’ll take it.”

Mrs. Duffield’s first words, however, put everything else in the world out of Lewis’ mind. His fingers gripped the bar of the instrument and he listened with a graying face. Yet, when his turn came to speak, his voice was full of confidence, even buoyant. “You have the very best man. Doctor Stephens is an authority. That gives Michael every human chance possible. You did just the right thing. Tell Michael I am catching the first express and will be there in a few hours. My dear, don’t cry....”

He set down the instrument with soft precision then, on the sounds of a woman’s sobs. The next instant he was out in his reception office, his hat jammed under one arm, thrusting his letters into the two pockets of his coat, and looking for Miss Frazier. Petra had no existence for him now. She had been wiped from his consciousness by the bitter news he had just received, without need of a struggle after all. Miss Frazier got up from the chair she had drawn close to Petra’s while she taught her the use of the telephone switchboard, ready for his demands.

“I’m catching the New York Express. Michael Duffield’s got infantile paralysis. He wants me. Stephens is on the case. That gives the kid every chance. I’ll call you up to-night if there’s anything to tell. Doctor Cotsworth will have to take the clinic to-morrow. Give him the dope on the Pettis case pretty carefully. It’s in the file. Tell Doctor Hagar I’ll call him long distance at four this afternoon and to stay in for it. He’ll have to handle that Arlington business without me. Put the private patients off by telephone. But you’ll have to send a message to McCloud, of course. Give him an appointment for Saturday afternoon. The others will have to wait for appointments till we know when I’ll be back. But before you do anything get in touch with the hospital—” But he broke off. “This is nonsense. There isn’t time. Grab your hat, bring your book. We’ll finish in the taxi.”

He remembered the new assistant then and commanded, “Petra, get us a taxi and tell them it’s rush. Give her the number, Miss Frazier. I’ll get the elevator up.”

Miss Frazier followed the doctor out, not bothering about her hat, but her shorthand pad and her fountain pen were clutched in her hand, and she even had the presence of mind to snatch a pencil from Petra’s desk in case the pen ran dry. Petra got the promise from the taxi company that the car would be at the door in a minute and then went through to the doctor’s office to see whether they actually managed it. To her utter relief, a taxi drew up at the curb just as the doctor and Miss Frazier came out to it. Petra was exhilarated. So far, then, she was a success at this job. There had been no slip. She had been efficient.

Petra had worries enough—even anguish of a sort—to keep her from being radiantly happy over having a job. Yet it was a dream come true. A year ago, why, even this spring, she would have been radiantly happy. But then it needn’t have been a double job; she needn’t have lived at Green Doors and done the stepdaughter act evenings and holidays. She would have gone to stay with Teresa and they would really have lived. Such freedom, such self-respect, and happiness as would have been hers then! That was the way she had planned it, exhilarated by the very imagining. And now—how different—.

But suddenly Petra forgot brilliant might-have-beens, for her telephone was ringing! She flew. She slipped into her chair, knees under the desk, her spine very straight and businesslike, her eyes grave and listening.—“This is Doctor Pryne’s office.”—And whoever was at the other end of the wire must have known from the pure and winged quality of her voice that the person answering Doctor Pryne’s telephone was young, beautiful, and very much on the job.

“Ordinarily you and I must not tell each other, or discuss, things that come up in Doctor Pryne’s work,—not in terms of personalities, anyway. But Michael, of course, is different. He isn’t a ‘case.’ It is almost as if a child of Doctor Pryne’s had infantile paralysis. Why, it isn’t even almost. It is just the same, really. That’s why I’ve told you about Michael. It would be inhuman for you not to know, when Doctor Pryne returns, whether the boy is lost or saved—how he is feeling about it.”