“I’ve thought sometimes I’d like to try my hand at a regular news story,” she went on, in a changed tone.  “I think I’ve got one, if I could only do it right; one of those facts-behind-the-news stories that you talked to us about.  Do you remember meeting me with Max Veltman the other night?”

“Yes.”

“Did you think it was queer?”

“A little.”

“A girl I used to know back in the country tried to kill herself.  She wrote me a letter, but it didn’t get to me till after midnight, so I called up Max and got him to go with me down to the Rookeries district where she lives.  Poor little Maggie!  She got caught in one of those sewing-girl traps.”

“Some kind of machinery?”

“Machinery?  You don’t know much about what goes on in your town, do you?”

“Not as much as an editor ought to know—­which is everything.”

“I’ll bring you Maggie’s letter.  That tells it better than I can.  And I want to write it up, too.  Let me write it up for the paper.”  She leaned forward and her eyes besought him.  “I want to prove I can do something besides being a vulgar little ‘Kitty the Cutie.’”

“Oh, my dear,” he said, half paternally, but only half, “I’m sorry I hurt you with that word.”

“You didn’t mean to.”  Her smile forgave him.  “Maggie’s story means another fight for the paper.  Can we stand another?”

He warmed to the possessive “we.”  “So you know about our warfare,” he said.

“More than you think, perhaps.  The books you gave me aren’t the only things I study.  I study the ‘Clarion,’ too.”

“Why?” he asked, interested.

“Because it’s yours.”  She looked at him straightly now.  “Can you pull it through, Boss?”

“I think so.  I hope so.”

“We’ve lost a lot of ads.  I can reckon that up, because I had some experience in the advertising department of the Certina shop, and I know rates.”  She pursed her lips with a dainty effect of careful computation.  “Somewhere about four thousand a week out, isn’t it?”

“Four thousand, three hundred and seventy in store business last week.”

The talk settled down and confined itself to the financial and editorial policies of the paper, Milly asking a hundred eager and shrewd questions, now and again proffering some tentative counsel or caution.  Impersonal though it seemed, through it Hal felt a growing tensity of intercourse; a sense of pregnant and perilous intimacy drawing them together.

“Since you’re taking such an interest, I might get you to help Mr. Ellis run the paper when I go away,” he suggested jocularly.

“You’re not going away?” The query came in a sort of gasp.

“Next week.”

“For long?” Her hand, as if in protest against the dreaded answer, went out to the arm of his chair.  His own met and covered it reassuringly.

“Not very.  It’s the new press.”

“We’re going to have a new press?”