as Kate was fond of putting it, always ready to fill in for anything from chaperon to nurse, always open for any lark we planned, from a Bohemian dinner to the opera, now weeks went by without our seeing him at our house.  In the office it used to be a saying that outside gong-strikes, Bob Brownley did not know he was in the stock business.  Formerly every clerk knew when Bob came or went, for it was with a rush, a shout, a laugh, and a bang of doors; and on the floor of the Stock Exchange no man played so many pranks, or filled his orders with so much jolly good-nature and hilarious boisterousness.  But from the day the Virginian girl crossed his path, Bob Brownley was a man who was thinking, thinking, thinking all the time.  It was only with an effort that he would keep his eyes on whomever he was talking with long enough to take in what was said, and if the saying occupied much time it would be apparent to the talker that Bob was off in the clouds.  All his friends and associates remarked the change, but I alone, except perhaps Kate, had any idea of the cause.  I knew that two million dollars and the coming New Year were hurdling like kangaroos over Bob’s mental rails and ditches, though I did not know it from anything he told me, for after that talk on the upper deck of the Tribesman he had shut up like a clam.

He did not exactly shun me, but showed me in many ways that he had entered into a new world, in which he desired to be alone.  That Beulah Sands’s plight had roused into intense activity all the latent romance of my friend’s nature, did not surprise me.  I foresaw from the first that Bob would fall head over heels in love with this beautiful, sorrow-laden girl, and it was soon obvious that the long-delayed shaft had planted its point in the innermost depths of his being.  His was more than love; a fervid idolatry now had possession of his soul, mind, and body.  Yet its outward manifestations were the opposite of what one would have looked for in this gay and optimistic Southerner.  It was rather priest-like worship, a calm imperturbability that nothing seemed to distract or upset, at least in the presence of the goddess who was its object.  Every morning he would pass through my office headed straight for the little room she occupied as if it were his one objective point of the day, but once he heard his own “Good morning, Miss Sands,” he seemed to round to, and while in her presence was the Bob Brownley of old.  He would be in and out all day on any and every pretext, always entering with an undisguised eagerness, leaving with a slow, dreamy reluctance.  That he never saw her outside the office, I am sure, for she said good-night to him when he or she left for the day with the same don’t-come-with-me dignity that she exhibited to all the rest of us.  I had not attempted to say a word to Bob about his feeling for Beulah Sands, nor had he ever brought up the subject to me.  On the contrary, he studiously avoided it.