Page:Dangerous Business (1927).pdf/211

 "You'd stand one type of man on his head," announced Di, glancing into the glass, "if you did your work this way."

Di retreated and raised her hands, satisfiedly, to her shorn, auburn locks. "I stand the other types on their thinning topknots," she observed, complacently.

In her usual plain blue dress, with her hair wound round her head, Ellen was in her usual place beside Mr. Rountree when the door opened with the impulsive push which had heralded Jay. She started, looked up and there he was, alone!

Of course he'd come alone to the office; his wife never had visited the building, yet Ellen was sure, at sight of him and before his father obtained statement of the fact, that he had returned alone.

His hand, withdrawn from his father's, was grasping hers.

"Lakes are wide open," he was saying. "Saw the ore-boats from the train."

"Yes; father's come and gone." Was she clinging to his hand? She pulled away suddenly but he looked at her a moment longer before he answered his father's inquiries of his sister and Ralph.

When he stepped out, Ellen improvised an errand to her own little room for refuge to compose herself before she resumed with pad and pencil at his father's side. "Not reunited," drummed in her head and she all but wrote it down. "Not reunited here."

Jay, seeking the sales department, did not immediately