“And when I come back, Mr. Benson?” said Wayne.

“Your place will be open for you here.”

There was a pause.

“Well, what do you say?” said Honaton.

“I feel very grateful for the offer,” said Pete, “but of course I can’t give you an answer now.”

“Why not, why not?” returned Honaton, who felt that he had given up half an hour for nothing if the thing couldn’t be settled on the spot; and even Benson, Wayne noticed, began to glower.

“You could probably give us as good an answer to-day as to-morrow,” he said.

Nothing roused Pete’s spirit like feeling a tremor in his own soul, and so he now answered with great firmness: 

“I cannot give you an answer to-day or to-morrow.”

“It’s all off, then, all off,” said Honaton, moving to the door.

“When do the Chinese boats sail, Mr. Honaton?” said Pete, with the innocence of manner that an employee should use when putting his superior in a hole.

“I don’t see what difference that makes to you, Wayne, if you’re not taking them,” said Honaton, as if he were triumphantly concealing the fact that he didn’t know.

“Don’t feel you have to wait, Jack, if you’re in a hurry,” said his partner, and when the other had slid out of the office Benson turned to Wayne and went on:  “You wouldn’t have to go until a week from Saturday.  You would have to get off then, and we should have to know in time to find some one else in case you don’t care for it.”

Pete asked for three days, and presently left the office.

He had a friend, one of his mother’s reformed drunkards, who as janitor lived on the top floor of a tall building.  He and his wife offered Wayne the hospitality of their balcony, and now and then, in moments like this, he availed himself of it.  Not, indeed, that there had ever been a moment quite like this; for he knew that he was facing the most important decision he had ever been forced to make.

In the elevator he met the janitor’s cat Susan going home after an afternoon visit to the restaurant on the sixteenth floor.  The elevator boy loved to tell how she never made a mistake in the floor.

“Do you think she’d get off at the fifteenth or the seventeenth?  Not she.  Sometimes she puts her nose out and smells at the other floors, but she won’t get off until I stop at the right one.  Sometimes she has to ride up and down three or four times before any one wants the sixteenth.  Eh, Susan?” he added in caressing tones; but Susan was watching the floors flash past and paid no attention until, arrived at the top, she and Pete stepped off together.

It was a cool, clear day, for the wind was from the north, but on the southern balcony the sun was warm.  Pete sat down in the kitchen-chair set for him, tilted back, and looked out over the Statue of Liberty, which stood like a stunted baby, to the blue Narrows.  He saw one thing clearly, and that was that he would not go if Mathilde would not go with him.