One month, one hot New York month, passed before the imperial Mr. Guilfogle gave him back The Job, and then at seventeen dollars and fifty cents a week instead of his former nineteen dollars.  Mr. Wrenn refused, upon pretexts, to go out with the manager for a drink, and presented him with twenty suggestions for new novelties and circular letters.  He rearranged the unsystematic methods of Jake, the cub, and two days later he was at work as though he had never in his life been farther from the Souvenir Company than Newark.

CHAPTER XIII

HE IS “OUR MR. WRENN”

DEAR ISTRA,—­I am back in New York feeling very well & hope this finds you the same.  I have been wanting to write to you for quite a while now but there has not been much news of any kind & so I have not written to you.  But now I am back working for the Souvenir Company.  I hope you are having a good time in Paris it must be a very pretty city & I have often wished to be there perhaps some day I shall go.  I [several erasures here] have been reading quite a few books since I got back & think now I shall get on better with my reading.  You told me so many things about books & so on & I do appreciate it.  In closing, I am yours very sincerely,
                                             WILLIAM WRENN.

There was nothing else he could say.  But there were a terrifying number of things he could think as he crouched by the window overlooking West Sixteenth Street, whose dull hue had not changed during the centuries while he had been tramping England.  Her smile he remembered—­and he cried, “Oh, I want to see her so much.”  Her gallant dash through the rain—­and again the cry.

At last he cursed himself, “Why don’t you do something that ’d count for her, and not sit around yammering for her like a fool?”

He worked on his plan to “bring the South into line”—­the Souvenir Company’s line.  Again and again he sprang up from the writing-table in his hot room when the presence of Istra came and stood compellingly by his chair.  But he worked.

The Souvenir Company salesmen had not been able to get from the South the business which the company deserved if right and justice were to prevail.  On the steamer from England Mr. Wrenn had conceived the idea that a Dixieland Ink-well, with the Confederate and Union flags draped in graceful cast iron, would make an admirable present with which to draw the attention of the Southem trade.  The ink-well was to be followed by a series of letters, sent on the slightest provocation, on order or re-order, tactfully hoping the various healths of the Southland were good and the baseball season important; all to insure a welcome to the salesmen on the Southem route.

He drew up his letters; he sketched his ink-well; he got up the courage to talk with the office manager....  To forget love and the beloved, men have ascended in aeroplanes and conquered African tribes.  To forget love, a new, busy, much absorbed Mr. Wrenn, very much Ours, bustled into Mr. Guilfogle’s office, slapped down his papers on the desk, and demanded:  “Here’s that plan about gettin’ the South interested that I was telling you about.  Say, honest, I’d like awful much to try it on.  I’d just have to have part time of one stenographer.”