Various persons unceremoniously entered and asked questions, all of which Stanway answered with equal dryness and certainty.  At intervals he poked the fire with an old walking-stick, Ethel never glanced up.  In a dream she handled the dictionary, the letter, the blank paper, and wrote unfinished phrases with the thick office pen.

‘Done it?’ he inquired at last.

‘I—­I—­can’t make out the figures,’ she stammered.  ‘Is that a 5 or a 7?’ She pushed the letter across.

‘Oh!  That’s a French 7,’ he replied, and proceeded to make shots at the meaning of sentences with a flair far surpassing her own skill, though it was notorious that he knew no French whatever.  She had a sudden perception of his cleverness, his capacity, his force, his mysterious hold on all kinds of things which eluded her grasp and dismayed her.

‘Let’s see what you’ve done,’ he demanded.  She sighed in despair, hesitating to give up the paper.

‘Mr. Twemlow, by appointment,’ announced a clerk, and Arthur Twemlow walked into the office.

‘Hallo, Twemlow!’ said Stanway, meeting him gaily.  ’I was just expecting you.  My new confidential clerk.  Eh?’ He pointed to Ethel, who flushed to advantage.  ‘You’ve plenty of them over there, haven’t you—­girl-clerks?’

Twemlow assented, and remarked that he himself employed a ’lady secretary.’

‘Yes,’ Stanway eagerly went on.  ’That’s what I mean to do.  I mean to buy a type-writer, and Miss shall learn shorthand and type-writing.’

Ethel was astounded at the glibness of invention which could instantly bring forth such an idea.  She felt quite sure that until that moment her father had had no plan at all in regard to her attendance at the office.

‘I’m sure I can’t learn,’ she said with genuine modesty, and as she spoke she became very attractive to Twemlow, who said nothing, but smiled at her sympathetically, protectively.  She returned the smile.  By a swift miracle the violet was back again in its native bed.

‘You can go in there and finish your work, we shall disturb you,’ said her father, pointing to the little empty room, and she meekly disappeared with the letter, the dictionary, and the piece of paper.

* * * * *

‘Well, how’s business, Twemlow?  By the way, have a cigar.’

Ethel, at the dusty table in the little room, could just see her father’s broad back through the door which, in her nervousness, she had forgotten to close.  She felt that the door ought to have been latched, but she could not find courage deliberately to get up and latch it now.

‘Thanks,’ said Arthur Twemlow.  ‘Business is going right along.’

She heard the striking of a match, and the pleasant twang of cigar-smoke greeted her nostrils.  The two men seemed splendidly masculine, important, self-sufficient.  The triviality of feminine atoms like herself, Rose, and Millicent, occurred to her almost as a new fact, and she was ashamed of her existence.