* * * * *

Elas Peterman set the ’phone back in its place.  His dark eyes were smiling.  They were shining, too, in a curious, not altogether wholesome fashion.  He had just finished talking to Nancy McDonald, and he was thinking of the vision of red hair, of the serious hazel eyes gazing out of their setting of fair, almost transparent complexion.

He took up his pen to continue the letter he had been writing.  But he added no word.  The girl he had been speaking with still occupied his thoughts to the exclusion of all else.

He was a good-looking man, clean cut and youthful.  His profile was finely chiselled.  But his Teutonic origin was clearly marked.  It was in the straight square back of his head.  It was in the prominent, heavily, rounded chin, and the squareness of his lower jaw.  Furthermore, the high, mathematical forehead was quite unmistakable.  There was power, force, in the personality of the man.  But there was something else.  It lay in his mouth, in his eyes.  The former was gross, and definite sensuality looked out of the latter.

As the door opened to admit Nancy his pen promptly descended on his paper.  But he did not write.  He looked up with a smile.

“Come right in, my dear,” he said cordially, with the patronising familiarity of a man conscious of his power.  “Just sit right down while I finish this letter.”  Then he added gratuitously, “It’s a rude letter to a feller I’ve no use for; and I don’t guess to rob myself of the pleasure of passing it plenty to him—­in my own handwriting.”

Nancy smiled as she took the chair beside the desk which was usually assigned to her in her intercourse with her chief.

“I wish I felt that way writing a bad letter,” she said.  “But I don’t.  It just makes me madder with folks, and I go right on thinking things, and—­and—­it worries.”

Elas Peterman shook his head.

“Guess you’ll get over that, my dear,” he said easily.  “Sure you will.  You’re just a dandy-minded kid, learning the things of life.  You feel good most all the time.  That’s how it is.  You want to laff and see things happy all around you.  Later you’ll get so you see the other feller mostly thinks of himself, and don’t care a hoot for the folks sitting around.  Then you’ll feel different; and you’ll tell folks you don’t like the things you feel about them.”

He went on writing, smiling at his own cynicism.

Nancy leant back in her chair.  His words left her unaffected.  She was used to him.  But, for a moment, she contemplated the dark head, supported on his hand, without any warmth of regard.