or the Chippering Mill:  it had never made his cigars taste bitter; it had never caused a deterioration in the appreciation of what he had achieved and held.  But now he was experiencing strange symptoms of an intensity out of all proportion to that of former relations with the other sex.  What was most unusual for him, he was alarmed and depressed, at moments irritable.  He regretted the capricious and apparently accidental impulse that had made him pretend to tinker with his automobile that day by the canal, that had led him to the incomparable idiocy of getting rid of Miss Ottway and installing the disturber of his peace as his private stenographer.

What the devil was it in her that made him so uncomfortable?  When in his office he had difficulty in keeping his mind on matters of import; he would watch her furtively as she went about the room with the lithe and noiseless movements that excited him the more because he suspected beneath her outward and restrained demeanour a fierceness he craved yet feared.  He thought of her continually as a panther, a panther he had caught and could not tame; he hadn’t even caught her, since she might escape at any time.  He took precautions not to alarm her.  When she brushed against him he trembled.  Continually she baffled and puzzled him, and he never could tell of what she was thinking.  She represented a whole set of new and undetermined values for which he had no precedents, and unlike every woman he had known—­including his wife—­she had an integrity of her own, seemingly beyond the reach of all influences economic and social.  All the more exasperating, therefore, was a propinquity creating an intimacy without substance, or without the substance he craved for she had magically become for him a sort of enveloping, protecting atmosphere.  In an astonishingly brief time he had fallen into the habit of talking things over with her; naturally not affairs of the first importance, but matters such as the economy of his time:  when, for instance, it was most convenient for him to go to Boston; and he would find that she had telephoned, without being told, to the office there when to expect him, to his chauffeur to be on hand.  He never had to tell her a thing twice, nor did she interrupt—­as Miss Ottway sometimes had done—­the processes of his thought.  Without realizing it he fell into the habit of listening for the inflections of her voice, and though he had never lacked the power of making decisions, she somehow made these easier for him especially if, a human equation were involved.

He had, at least, the consolation—­if it were one—­of reflecting that his reputation was safe, that there would be no scandal, since two are necessary to make the kind of scandal he had always feared, and Miss Bumpus, apparently, had no intention of being the second party.  Yet she was not virtuous, as he had hitherto defined the word.  Of this he was sure.  No woman who moved about as she did, who had such an effect on him, who had on occasions,