“Naturally,” murmured Norman, in confusion.  “I thought—­perhaps—­he was interested in you.”

She laughed outright—­and he had an entrancing view of the clean rosy interior of her mouth.  “In me?—­Mr. Tetlow?  Why, he’s too serious and important for a girl like me.”

“Then he bored you?”

“Oh, no.  I like him.  He is a good man—­thoroughly good.”

This pleased Norman immensely.  It may be fine to be good, but to be called good—­that is somehow a different matter.  It removes a man at once from the jealousy-provoking class.  “Good exactly describes him,” said Norman.  “He wouldn’t harm a fly.  In love he’d be ridiculous.”

“Not with a woman of his own age and kind,” protested she.  “But I’m neglecting my work.”

And she returned to it with a resolute manner that made him ashamed to interrupt again—­especially after the unconscious savage rebukes she had administered.  He sat there fighting against the impulse to watch her—­denouncing himself—­appealing to pride, to shame, to prudence—­to his love for Josephine—­to the sense of decency that restrains a hunter from aiming at a harmless tame song bird.  But all in vain.  He concentrated upon her at last, stared miserably at her, filled with longing and dread and shame—­and longing, and yet more longing.

When she finished and stood at the other side of the desk, waiting for him to pass upon her work, she must have thought he was in a profound abstraction.  He did not speak, made a slight motion with his hand to indicate that she was to go.  Shut in alone, he buried his face in his arms.  “What madness!” he groaned.  “If I loved her, there’d be some excuse for me.  But I don’t.  I couldn’t.  Yet I seem ready to ruin everything, merely to gratify a selfish whim—­an insane whim.”

On top of the papers she had left he saw a separate slip.  He drew it toward him, spread it out before him.  Her address.  An unknown street in Jersey City!

“I’ll not go,” he said aloud, pushing the slip away.  Go?  Certainly not.  He had never really meant to go.  He would, of course, keep his engagement with Josephine.  “And I’ll not come down town until she has taken another job and has caught Tetlow.  I’ll stop this idiocy of trying to make an impression on a person not worth impressing.  What weak vanity—­to be piqued by this girl’s lack of interest!”

Nevertheless—­he at six o’clock telephoned to the Burroughs’ house that he was detained down town.  He sent away his motor, dined alone in the station restaurant in Jersey City.  And at half past seven he set out in a cab in search of—­what?  He did not dare answer that interrogation.

VI

Life many another chance explorer from New York, Norman was surprised to discover that, within a few minutes of leaving the railway station, his cab was moving through a not unattractive city.  He expected to find the Hallowells in a tenement in some more or less squalid street overhung with railway smoke and bedaubed with railway grime.  He was delighted when the driver assured him that there was no mistake, that the comfortable little cottage across the width of the sidewalk and a small front yard was the sought-for destination.