The following week saw Miss Sands, of Virginia, private secretary to the head of Randolph & Randolph, established in a little office between mine and Bob’s.  She had not been there a day before we knew she was a worker.  She spent the hours going over reports and analysing financial statements, showing a sagacity extraordinary in so young a person.  She explained her knowledge of figures by the hand-work she had done for the judge, all of whose accounts she had kept.  Bob and I saw that she was bent on smothering her memory in that antidote for all ills of heart and soul—­work.  Her office life was simplicity itself.  She spoke to no one except Bob, save in connection with such business matters of the firm’s as I might send her by one of the clerks to attend to.  To the others in the banking-house she was just an unconventional young literary woman whose high social connections had gained her this opportunity of getting at the secrets of finance, from actual experience, for use in forthcoming novels.  It had got abroad that she was the writer of great distinction who, under a nom de plume, had recently made quite a dent in the world’s literary shell—­a suggestion that I rightly guessed was one of Bob’s delicate ways of smoothing out her path.  I had tried in every way to make things easy for her, but it was impossible for me to draw her out in talk, and finally I gave it up.  Had it not been that every time I passed her office door I was compelled by the fascination which I had first felt, and which, instead of diminishing, had increased with her reticence, to look in at the quiet figure with the downcast eyes, working away at her desk as though her life depended on never missing a second, I should not have known she was in the building.  My wife, at my suggestion, had tried to induce her to visit us; in fact, after I let her into just enough of Beulah Sands’s story so that she could see things on a true slant, she had decided to try to bring her to our house to live.  But though the girl was sweetly gentle in her appreciation of Kate’s thoughtful attentions, in her simple way she made us both feel that our efforts would be for naught, that her position must be the same as that of any other clerk in the office.  We both finally left her to herself.  Bob explained to me, some three weeks after she came to the office, that she received no visitors at her home, a hotel on a quiet uptown street, and that even he had never had permission to call upon her there.

But from the day she came to occupy her desk in our office, Bob was a changed man, whether for better or for worse neither Kate nor I could decide.  His old bounding elasticity was gone, and with it his rollicking laugh.  He was now a man where before he had been a boy, a man with a burden.  Even if I had not heard Beulah Sands’s story, I should have guessed that Bob was staggering under a strange load.  While before, from the close of the Stock Exchange until its opening the next morning, he was,