Just then the delivery-wagon drove up in front of the store.  The driver, who was a young fellow in the first stages of pulmonary consumption, got down with weakly alacrity from the seat and came in to get the new orders.  He coughed as he entered, but he looked radiant.  He was driving the delivery-wagon in the hope of recovering his health by out-of-door life, and he was, or flattered himself that he was, perceptibly gaining.

“Where’s the next delivery?” he inquired, hoarsely.

“Wait a minute,” said the old clerk, and again invaded the office.

“They ’ain’t paid their hired girl,” he said, in a whisper.  “Had we better—­”

“Better what?” said Anderson, impatiently, though he looked confused.

“Better send them things to the Carrolls’?”

“Didn’t I tell you?  What—­”

“Oh, all right, sir,” said the clerk, and retreated hastily.  At times he had an awe of his employer.

“Goin’ to take all that truck to the Carrolls’?” inquired the consumptive deliverer.

“Yep,” replied the boy, lugging out the flour-bag.

“Credit,” whispered the man.

The boy nodded.

The man essayed a whistle, but he coughed.  “Well, it’s none of my funeral,” he declared, when he got his breath, “but I hear he’s a dead-beat.  I s’pose he knows what he is about.”

“If he don’t, nobody is goin’ to tell him, you bet,” said the boy, succinctly.

“Well, it’s none of my funeral,” said the man, and he coughed again, and gathered up the reins, and drove away in a cloud of dust down the street.  It had not rained for two weeks and the roads gave evidence of it.

Anderson, back in his office, heard the sound of the retreating wheels with a feeling of annoyance, even scorn of himself for his gullibility, and his stress upon the financial part of the affair.

He was losing a good deal of money, and he did not wish to do so.  “I am a fool,” he told himself, with that voice of mentality which sounds the loudest, to the consciousness, of any voice on earth.  He frowned, then he laughed a little, and began mounting a fine new butterfly specimen.  “Other men marry and spend their hard earnings in that way, on love,” said he.  “Why should I not spend mine after this fashion if I choose?”

That noon, as he passed out of the store on his way home to dinner, Ina and Charlotte came out of the dressmaker’s opposite.  They looked flushed and happily excited.  Charlotte carried a large parcel.  They rushed past without seeing him at all, as he gained the opposite sidewalk.  He walked along, grave and self-possessed.  Nobody seeing him would have dreamed of his inward perturbation, that spiritual alienation as secret as the processes of the body.

Nobody could have suspected how his fond thought and yearning followed one of those small, hurrying, girlish figures.  In a way the man, even with his frustrated aims in the progress of life, was so superior to the little, unconscious feminine thing whose chief assets of life were her youth and innocence, and even those of slight weight against the man’s age and innocence, that it seemed a pity.