“It is serious.  Whether I ought to have spoken or not.”

"I tell you, you ought to have spoken.  It was—­brave of you.  That’s the way I always think of you, Miss Child, being brave—­whatever happens.  And laughing.”

“I don’t laugh now.”

“Not at other people’s troubles—­I know.  But you would at your own.”

“I’m not thinking of my own.  To-day of all days!”

He wondered what she meant.  His mind flashed swiftly back to last night and all that had happened.  He could have kissed the hem of her black dress to see her here, safe and vital enough to fling reproaches at him for his sins—­of omission.  Yet he must stand coldly discussing grievances.  No, “coldly” was not the word.  No word could have been less appropriate to the boiling emotions under Peter Rolls’s grave, composed manner.

He let the baffling sentence go—­a sentence which framed thoughts of Sadie Kirk.

“I should like to hear from you the specific wrongs you want righted,” he said.  “I know a girl of your sort wouldn’t speak vaguely.  You do mean something specific.”

“Yes—­I do.”

“Then tell me—­now.”

“You came to buy a cloak for your mother.”

“I didn’t come for that, and you know it.  I came for you.  But you put a shield between us to keep me off.  When you have emptied your heart of some of these grievances that are making it hot—­against me, maybe you won’t have to put me at the same distance.  Maybe you’ll let me be your friend again, if I can deserve it.”

“I don’t want to talk or think of ourselves at all!” she broke out.

“I don’t ask you to.  All that—­and my mother’s cloak, too—­you needn’t be getting down that box!—­can wait.  If you won’t be my friend, anyhow show me how to help your friends.”

“Oh, if you would do that!” Win cried.

“I will.  Give me the chance.”

Despite his injunction, she had taken from its neat oak shelf a box of summer wraps and placed it on the counter behind which she stood.  Now, not knowing what she did, she lifted the cardboard cover and seemed to peep in at the folds of chiffon and silk.

Peter looked not at the box, but at her pitiful, reddened hands on the lid.  The blood mounted slowly to his temples and he bit his lip.  He, too, was standing, though any one of several green velvet-covered stools was at his service.  He turned away, leaning so much weight on the bamboo stick he held that it bent and rather surprised him.

Suddenly the scene struck him as very strange, almost unreal—­Winifred Child, his lost dryad, found in his father’s store, separated from him by a dignified barrier of oak and many other things invisible!  This talk going on between them—­after last night!  The hum of women’s voices in the distance (they kept their distance in this vast department because he was Peter Rolls, Jr., as all the employees by this time knew) and the heavy heat and the smell of oak seemed to add to the unreality of what was going on.  Fresias would have helped.  But there was nothing here that suggested help—­unless you wanted advice about a cloak.