“I might have known,” she thought in a little panic.  “It’s my own fault.”  But when she tried to pull her hand away, her panic grew.

“No, no,” said Burdon, laughing low, his eyes more reckless than ever, “you might tell—­if I stopped now.  But you’ll never tell a soul on earth—­if I kiss you.”

Even while Mary was struggling, her head held down, she couldn’t help thinking, “So that’s the way he does it,” and felt, I think, as feels the fly who has walked into the parlour.  The next moment she heard a sharp voice, “Here—­stop that!” and running steps approaching.

“I think it was Archey,” she thought, as she made her escape, her knees shaking, her breath coming fast.  She knew it was, ten minutes later, when Archey found her in the office—­knew it from the way he looked at her and the hesitation of his speech—­but it wasn’t until they were shaking hands in parting that she saw the cut on his knuckles.

“You’ve hurt yourself,” she said.  “Wait; I have some adhesive plaster.”

Even then she didn’t guess.

“How did you do it?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t know—­”

Mary’s glance suddenly deepened into tenderness, and when Archey left a few minutes later, he walked as one who trod the clouds, his head among the stars.

An hour passed, and Mary looked in Uncle Stanley’s office.  Burdon’s desk was closed as though for the day.

“Where’s Burdon?” she asked.

“He wasn’t feeling very well,” said Uncle Stanley after a long look at his son’s desk, “—­a sort of headache.  I told him he had better go home.”

And every morning for the rest of the week, when she saw Uncle Stanley, she gave him such an innocent look and said, “How’s Burdon’s head this morning?  Any better?”

Uncle Stanley began to have the irritable feelings of an old mouse in the hands of a young kitten.

“That’s the worst of having women around,”—­he scowled to himself—­“they are worse than—­worse than—­worse than—­”

Searching for a simile, he thought of a flash of lightning, a steel hoop lying on its side, a hornet’s nest—­but none of these quite suited him.  He made a helpless gesture.

“Hang ’em, you never know what they’re up to next!” said he.

CHAPTER XIX

For that matter, there were times in the next two years when Mary herself hardly knew what she was up to next, for if ever a girl suddenly found herself in deep waters, it was the last of the Spencers.  Strangely enough—­although I think it is true of many of life’s undertakings—­it wasn’t the big things which bothered her the most.

She soon demonstrated—­if it needed any demonstration—­that what the women of France and Britain had done, the women of New Bethel could do.  At each call of the draft, more and more men from Spencer & Son obeyed the beckoning finger of Mars, and more and more women presently took their places in the workshops.  That was simply a matter of enlarging the training school, of expanding the courses of instruction.