He rushed into the dressing room attached to his office, plunged his face into ice-cold water.  This somewhat eased the burning sensation that was becoming intolerable.  Many were the unaccountable incidents in his acquaintance with this strange creature; the most preposterous was this sudden seizure.  He realized now that his feeling for her had been like the quiet, steady, imperceptible filling of a reservoir that suddenly announces itself by the thunder and roar of a mighty cascade over the dam.  “This is madness—­sheer madness!  I am still master within myself.  I will make short work of this rebellion.”  And with an air of calmness so convincing that he believed in it he addressed himself to the task of sanity and wisdom lying plain before him.  “A man of my position caught by a girl like that!  A man such as I am, caught by any woman whatever!” It was grotesque.  He opened his door to summon Tetlow.

The gate in the outside railing was directly opposite, and about thirty feet away.  Tetlow and Miss Hallowell were going out—­evidently to lunch together.  She was looking up at the chief clerk with laughing eyes—­they seemed coquettish to the infuriated Norman.  And Tetlow—­the serious and squab young ass was gazing at her with the expression men of the stupid squab sort put on when they wish to impress a woman.  At this spectacle, at the vision of that slim young loveliness, that perfect form and deliciously smooth soft skin, white beyond belief beneath its faintly golden tint—­the hot blood steamed up into Norman’s brain, blinded his sight, reddened it with desire and jealousy.  He drew back, closed his door with a bang.

“This is not I,” he muttered.  “What has happened?  Am I insane?”

* * * * *

When Tetlow returned from lunch the office boy on duty at the gate told him that Mr. Norman wished to see him at once.  Like all men trying to advance along ways where their fellow men can help or hinder, the head clerk was full of more or less clever little tricks thought out with a view to making a good impression.  One of them was to stamp upon all minds his virtue of promptness—­of what use to be prompt unless you forced every one to feel how prompt you were?  He went in to see Norman, with hat in hand and overcoat on his back and one glove off, the other still on.  Norman was standing at a window, smoking a cigarette.  His appearance—­dress quite as much as manner—­was the envy of his subordinate—­as, indeed, it was of hundreds of the young men struggling to rise down town.  It was so exactly what the appearance of a man of vigor and power and high position should be.  Tetlow practiced it by the quarter hour before his glass at home—­not without progress in the direction of a not unimpressive manner of his own.

As Tetlow stood at attention, Norman turned and advanced toward him.  “Mr. Tetlow,” he began, in his good-humored voice with the never wholly submerged under-note of sharpness, “is it your habit to go out to lunch with the young ladies employed here?  If so, I wish to suggest—­simply to suggest—­that it may be bad for discipline.”