“You were a sweet to think of it,” Emily said, gratefully, from the downy wide couch where she was spending the evening.

“Not at all, Kid,” Ella answered politely.  She yawned, and stared at the alabaster globe of the lamp above Emily’s head.  A silence fell.  The two sisters never had much to talk about, and Mrs. Saunders, dutifully sitting with the invalid, was heavy from dinner, and nearly asleep.  Ella yawned again.

“Want some chocolates?” she finally asked.

“Oh, thank you, Ella!”

“I’ll send Fannie in with ’em!” Miss Ella stood up, bent her head to study at close range an engraving on the wall, loitered off to her own room.  She was rarely at home in the evening and did not know quite what to do with herself.

Susan, meanwhile, walked upon air.  She tasted complete happiness for almost the first time in her life; awakened in the morning to blissful reality, instead of the old dreary round, and went to sleep at night smiling at her own happy thoughts.  It was all like a pleasant dream!

She resigned from her new position at Hunter, Baxter & Hunter’s exactly as she resigned in imagination a hundred times.  No more drudgery over bills, no more mornings spent in icy, wet shoes, and afternoons heavy with headache.  Susan was almost too excited to thank Mr. Brauer for his compliments and regrets.

Parting with Thorny was harder; Susan and she had been through many a hard hour together, had shared a thousand likes and dislikes, had loved and quarreled and been reconciled.

“You’re doing an awfully foolish thing, Susan.  You’ll wish you were back here inside of a month,” Thorny prophesied when the last moment came.  “Aw, don’t you do it, Susan!” she pleaded, with a little real emotion.  “Come on into Main Office, and sit next to me.  We’ll have loads of sport.”

“Oh, I’ve promised!” Susan held out her hand.  “Don’t forget me!” she said, trying to laugh.  Miss Thornton’s handsome eyes glistened with tears.  With a sudden little impulse they kissed each other for the first time.

Then Susan, a full hour before closing, went down from the lunch-room, and past all the familiar offices; the sadness of change tugging at her heart-strings.  She had been here a long time, she had smelled this same odor of scorching rubber, and oils and powders through so many slow afternoons, in gay moods and sad, in moods of rebellion and distaste.  She left a part of her girlhood here.  The cashier, to whom she went for her check, was all kindly interest, and the young clerks and salesmen stopped to offer her their good wishes.  Susan passed the time-clock without punching her number for the first time in three years, and out into the sunny, unfamiliar emptiness of the streets.

At the corner her heart suddenly failed her.  She felt as if she could not really go away from these familiar places and people.  The warehouses and wholesale houses, the wholesale liquor house with a live eagle magnificently caged in one window, the big stove establishment, with its window full of ranges in shining steel and nickel-plate; these had been her world for so long!