He was examining her from head to foot, as if to make sure that it was she with no charm missing.  He noted that she was much less poorly dressed than when she worked for his firm.  In those days she often looked dowdy, showed plainly the girl who has to make a hasty toilet in a small bedroom, with tiny wash-stand and looking-glass, in the early, coldest hours of a cold morning.  Now she looked well taken care of physically, not so well, not anything like so well as the women uptown—­the ladies with nothing to do but make toilettes; still, unusually well looked after for a working girl.  At first glance after those famished and ravening days of longing for her and seeking her, she before him in rather dim reality of the obvious office-girl, seemed disappointing.  It could not be that this insignificance was the cause of all his fever and turmoil.  He began to hope that he was recovering, that the cloud of insane desire was clearing from his sky.  But a second glance killed that hope.  For, once more he saw her mystery, her beauties that revealed their perfection and splendor only to the observant.

While he looked she was regaining her balance, as the fading color in her white skin and the subsidence of the excitement in her eyes evidenced.  “Let me pass, please,” she said coldly—­for, she was against the wall with him standing before her in such a way that she could not go until he moved aside.

“We’ll lunch together,” he said.  “I want to talk with you.  Did that well-meaning ass—­Tetlow—­tell you?”

“There is nothing you can say that I wish to hear,” was her quiet reply.

“Your eyes—­the edges of the lids are red.  You have been crying?”

She lifted her glance to his and he had the sense of a veil drawing aside to reveal a desolation.  “For my father,” she said.

His face flushed.  He looked steadily at her.  “Now that he is gone, you have no one to protect you.  I am——­”

“I need no one,” said she with a faintly contemptuous smile.

“You do need some one—­and I am going to undertake it.”

Her face lighted up.  He thought it was because of what he had said.  But she immediately undeceived him.  She said in a tone of delighted relief, “Here comes Mr. Tetlow.  You must excuse me.”

“Dorothy—­listen!” he cried.  “We are going to be married at once.”

The words exploded dizzily in his ears.  He assumed they would have a far more powerful effect upon her.  But her expression did not change.  “No,” she said hastily.  “I must go with Mr. Tetlow.”  Tetlow was now at hand, his heavy face almost formidable in its dark ferocity.  She said to him:  “I was waiting for you.  Come on”

Norman turned eagerly to his former friend.  He said:  “Tetlow, I have just asked Miss Hallowell to be my wife.”

Tetlow stared.  Then pain and despair seemed to flood and ravage his whole body.

“I told you the other day,” Norman went on, “that I was ready to do the fair thing.  I have just been saying to Miss Hallowell that she must have some one to protect her.  You agree with me, don’t you?”