nerve with you!  She can’t do more than have you fired out, and you’ve been fired before and got your breath after it.  So I turned round and made time.  And that was how I happened on your avenue.  And perhaps it was because I was feeling a bit rattled I lost my hold when the chain broke, and pitched over on my head.  There, I’ve got it off my chest.  I was thinking I should have to explain somehow.”

Something akin to her feeling of affection for the nice, long-legged Westerner she had seen rambling in Bond Street touched Betty again.  The Delkoff was the centre of G. Selden’s world as the flowers were of Kedgers’, as the “little ’ome” was of Mrs. Welden’s.

“Were you going to try to sell me a typewriter?” she asked.

“Well,” G. Selden admitted, “I didn’t know but what there might be use for one, writing business letters on a big place like this.  Straight, I won’t say I wasn’t going to try pretty hard.  It may look like gall, but you see a fellow has to rush things or he’ll never get there.  A chap like me has to get there, somehow.”

She was silent a few moments and looked as if she was thinking something over.  Her silence and this look on her face actually caused to dawn in the breast of Selden a gleam of daring hope.  He looked round at her with a faint rising of colour.

“Say, Miss Vanderpoel—­say——­” he began, and then broke off.

“Yes?” said Betty, still thinking.

“C-could you use one—­anywhere?” he said.  “I don’t want to rush things too much, but—­could you?”

“Is it easy to learn to use it?”

“Easy!” his head lifted from his pillow.  “It’s as easy as falling off a log.  A baby in a perambulator could learn to tick off orders for its bottle.  And—­on the square—­there isn’t its equal on the market, Miss Vanderpoel—­there isn’t.”  He fumbled beneath his pillow and actually brought forth his catalogue.

“I asked the nurse to put it there.  I wanted to study it now and then and think up arguments.  See—­adjustable to hold with perfect ease an envelope, an index card, or a strip of paper no wider than a postage stamp.  Unsurpassed paper feed, practical ribbon mechanism—­perfect and permanent alignment.”

As Mount Dunstan had taken the book, Betty Vanderpoel took it.  Never had G. Selden beheld such smiling in eyes about to bend upon his catalogue.

“You will raise your temperature,” she said, “if you excite yourself.  You mustn’t do that.  I believe there are two or three people on the estate who might be taught to use a typewriter.  I will buy three.  Yes—­we will say three.”

She would buy three.  He soared to heights.  He did not know how to thank her, though he did his best.  Dizzying visions of what he would have to tell “the boys” when he returned to New York flashed across his mind.  The daughter of Reuben S. Vanderpoel had bought three Delkoffs, and he was the junior assistant who had sold them to her.