It was promptly opened—­so promptly that Mr. Britt was fairly caught at what he was about.  He was standing up, shaking both fists at the door and cursing roundly.  Vona was gazing at him in alarm.

“I was waiting in the corridor, sir, till you—­till your business—­till Mr. Orne went away,” she stammered.

“Come in!” muttered Britt, even more disconcerted than the girl.

Then he wished that he had told her to go away.  He realized that he was in no mood or condition to woo; the cabbage had tortured him, but this new sort of indigestion in the very soul of him had left him without poise or courage.

He slumped down in his chair and waved a limp hand in invitation for her to take a seat near him.  But she merely came and stood in the middle of the room and surveyed him with an uncompromising air of business.  From the velvet toque, with just a suggestion of a coquettish cant on her brown curls, down her healthily round cheeks, a bit flushed, above the fur neckpiece that clasped her throat, Britt’s fervent eyes strayed.  And some of the words of the Prophet’s singsong monotone echoed in the empty chambers of Britt’s consciousness, “’Thou hast dove’s eyes within thy locks—­thy lips are like a thread of scarlet.’”

But she was aloof.  She held herself rigidly erect.  Her eyes were coldly inquiring.  Those lips were set tightly.  Mr. Britt had just been reaching out for honors, and his knuckles had been rapped cruelly.  He wanted to reach out for love—­and he dared not.  The girl, as she stood there, was so patently among the things he was not able to possess!

She had come into his presence with expectation keenly alert, with her fears putting her into a mental posture of defense.  She felt that she knew just what was going to happen, and she was assuring herself that she would be able to meet the situation.  But she was not prepared for what did happen.  She did not understand Britt’s mental state of that moment.  Mr. Britt, himself, did not understand.  He had never been up against conditions of that sort.  He had not had time to fix his face and his mood, as he did daily before the mirror in his bedroom.  He did what nobody had ever seen him do—­what neither he nor the girl would have predicted one minute before as among human probabilities—­he broke down and blubbered like a whipped urchin.

And after he had recovered some of his composure and was gazing up at her again, sniffling and scrubbing his reddened eyes with the bulge at the base of his thumb, knowing that he must say something by way of legitimate excuse, dreading the ridicule that a girl’s gossip might bring upon him, a notion that was characteristic of Mr. Britt came to him:  he grimly weighed the idea of telling her that Files’s boiled dinner was the cause of his breakdown.  However, in his weakness, his love flamed more hotly than ever before.

“Vona, I’m so lonesome!” he gulped.

Miss Harnden had entered behind her shield, nerved like a battling Amazon.  She promptly lowered that shield and became all woman, with a woman’s instinctive sympathetic understanding, but womanlike, she took the opportunity to introduce for her own defense a bit of guile with her sympathy.  “I quite understand how you feel about the loss of Mrs. Britt, sir.  And I’m glad because you remain so loyal to her memory.”