One warm evening, oppressed by such reflections, she had started home when she remembered having left her bag in the office, and retraced her steps.  As she turned the corner of West Street, she saw, beside the canal and directly in front of the bridge, a new and smart-looking automobile, painted crimson and black, of the type known as a runabout, which she recognized as belonging to Mr. Ditmar.  Indeed, at that moment Mr. Ditmar himself was stepping off the end of the bridge and about to start the engine when, dropping the crank, he walked to the dashboard and apparently became absorbed in some mechanisms there.  Was it the glance cast in her direction that had caused him to delay his departure?  Janet was seized by a sudden and rather absurd desire to retreat, but Canal Street being empty, such an action would appear eccentric, and she came slowly forward, pretending not to see her employer, ridiculing to herself the idea that he had noticed her.  Much to her annoyance, however, her embarrassment persisted, and she knew it was due to the memory of certain incidents, each in itself almost negligible, but cumulatively amounting to a suspicion that for some months he had been aware of her:  many times when he had passed through the outer office she had felt his eyes upon her, had been impelled to look up from her work to surprise in them a certain glow to make her bow her head again in warm confusion.  Now, as she approached him, she was pleasantly but rather guiltily conscious of the more rapid beating of the blood that precedes an adventure, yet sufficiently self-possessed to note the becoming nature of the light flannel suit axed rather rakish Panama he had pushed back from his forehead.  It was not until she had almost passed him that he straightened up, lifted the Panama, tentatively, and not too far, startling her.

“Good afternoon, Miss Bumpus,” he said.  “I thought you had gone.”

“I left my bag in the office,” she replied, with the outward calmness that rarely deserted her—­the calmness, indeed, that had piqued him and was leading him on to rashness.

“Oh,” he said.  “Simmons will get it for you.”  Simmons was the watchman who stood in the vestibule of the office entrance.

“Thanks.  I can get it myself,” she told him, and would have gone on had he not addressed her again.  “I was just starting out for a spin.  What do you think of the car?  It’s good looking, isn’t it?” He stood off and surveyed it, laughing a little, and in his laugh she detected a note apologetic, at variance with the conception she had formed of his character, though not alien, indeed, to the dust-coloured vigour of the man.  She scarcely recognized Ditmar as he stood there, yet he excited her, she felt from him an undercurrent of something that caused her inwardly to tremble.  “See how the lines are carried through.”  He indicated this by a wave of his hand, but his eyes were now on her.

“It is pretty,” she agreed.