Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/44

 her laughter popped like a champagne cork. The horrid truth burst upon him. The boss was courting the angel of the office with the very ammunition that Lester himself had furnished, and his vow of secrecy forbade him to disclose the truth. Oh, the paltry meanness of fate, the villainy of circumstance! It is impossible to describe the pangs it cost him to dissemble, cloak, disguise, and conceal the anguish he felt. But dissemble, cloak, disguise, and conceal he did, and though his heart glowed like an angry cigar stub, he reached home at last.

There he sat down at his table, and amid the healthy snores of his roommates he concocted a fine piece of literary ordnance. Late and grimly he toiled and contrived. At length he had fashioned a sonnet which would be the golden sum and substance of the previous sequence; a cry of the heart so splendidly forensic that Mr. Arundel would pounce upon it, yielding his crisp steel engraving in return. But see, the asp concealed in the basket of fruit, the adder in the woodpile! Read Lester's sonnet as an acrostic: