“Why not?  If they knew at the office, they’d simply talk—­unpleasantly.”

“Yes,” she admitted hesitatingly after reflecting.  “So you mustn’t come again.  I don’t like some kinds of secrets.”

“But your father will know,” he urged.  “Isn’t that enough for—­for propriety?”

“I can’t explain.  I don’t understand, myself.  I do a lot of things by instinct.”  She, standing with her hands behind her back and with clear, childlike eyes gravely upon him, looked puzzled but resolved.  “And my instinct tells me not to do anything secret about you.”

This answer made him wonder whether after all he might not be too positive in his derisive disbelief in women’s instincts.  He laughed.  “Well—­now for your father.”

The workshop proved to be an annex to the rear, reached by a passage leading past a cosy little dining room and a kitchen where the order and the shine of cleanness were notable even to masculine eyes.  “You are well taken care of,” he said to her—­she was preceding him to show the way.

“We take care of ourselves,” replied she.  “I get breakfast before I leave and supper after I come home.  Father has a cold lunch in the middle of the day, when he eats at all—­which isn’t often.  And on Saturday afternoons and Sundays I do the heavy work.”

“You are a busy lady!”

“Oh, not so very busy.  Father is a crank about system and order.  He has taught me to plan everything and work by the plans.”

For the first time Norman had a glimmer of real interest in meeting her father.  For in those remarks of hers he recognized at once the rare superior man—­the man who works by plan, where the masses of mankind either drift helplessly or are propelled by some superior force behind them without which they would be, not the civilized beings they seem, but even as the savage in the dugout or as the beast of the field.  The girl opened a door; a bright light streamed into the dim hallway.

“Father!” she called.  “Here’s Mr. Norman.”

Norman saw, beyond the exquisite profile of the girl’s head and figure, a lean tallish old man, dark and gray, whose expression proclaimed him at first glance no more in touch with the affairs of active life in the world than had he been an inhabitant of Mars.

Mr. Hallowell gave his caller a polite glance and handshake—­evidence of merest surface interest in him, of amiable patience with an intruder.  Norman saw in the neatness of his clothing and linen further proof of the girl’s loving care.  For no such abstracted personality as this would ever bother about such things for himself.  These details, however, detained Norman only for a moment.  In the presence of Hallowell it was impossible not to concentrate upon him.