“Aren’t you going to extend that privilege to me, Miss Brown?” he continued, fondling his heavy black mustache. “Mr. Vyce, I am very busy just now,” she replied, with some embarrassment. The bookkeeper gave her a savage glance and then walked away without another word. Much to her relief, he soon put on his hat and left the office abruptly, shutting the door with a slam. At the same moment Vance came out of the private office and stepped up beside the pretty typewriter. She looked up with a smile and did not offer to hide from his gaze the long typewritten letter on which she was engaged. Evidently there was nothing there Vance ought not to know. “Will you please turn on the light, Vance?” she asked, sweetly, her fingers never leaving the keys for a moment. “Certainly, Bessie,” he replied, with alacrity, raising his hand to the shaded electric bulb above her machine and turning the key, whereupon the slender wires burst into a white glow. “How much more have you to do?” “Another page, almost,” she answered, with another quick glance into his bright, eager young face. “I won’t be able to see you to the car to-night,” he said, regretfully. That was a pleasure the young man had for some time appropriated to himself and Bessie as willingly accorded. “You are going to stay downtown, then, for a while?” she asked. “Yes; I shall be here for an hour yet, perhaps. After supper I’ve got to meet Mr. Whitemore in his rooms at the Grand Pacific. I’ve got to notify mother of the fact by telephone.” Vance went over to the booth in the corner of the office and rang up a drug store in the vicinity of his home, on the North Side. Outside the shades of night were beginning to fall. From the windows of the office one could see directly up La Salle Street. The cars, as they made the turn into or out of the street at the corner of Monroe, flashed their momentary glares of red and green lights, and filled the air continually with the jangle of their bells. The sidewalks were filled with a dense crowd that poured out continually from the street entrances of the office buildings. They streamed out of the brokers’ offices and commission houses on either side of La Salle Street, and the tide set toward the upper end of the thoroughfare, where stood the girders and cables of the La Salle Street bridge. Vance took all this in with a brief survey from the window, after he had sent his message across the river. “What do you think?” said Bessie, as he paused once more beside her. “Mr. Vyce asked me to go to the theatre with him to-night. Hasn’t he a cheek?” “Of course you accepted?” said Vance with a grin. “Of course I did no such thing,” she answered, pausing for an instant in her work, as she looked up with an indignant flush on her creamy cheeks. “You know better than that, Vance. You just want to provoke me,” with a charming pout. “That’s right,” he answered, with a quiet chuckle, “but you mustn’t mind me.”