Humphrey initialed the copy, tossed it into the devil's basket, turned to a pile of proofs, paused as if recollecting something, picked up the copy again, glanced rapidly through it, and turned on his assistant. 'Look here, Hen,' he remarked, 'you don't tell what they sang, either of 'em. Or who _were_ among those present.' Henry was reading his little book at the moment, and fumbling at his moustache. A mournful object. He turned now, with a start, and stared, wide-eyed, at Humphrey. His lips parted, but he didn't speak. A touch of colour appeared in his cheeks. Then, as abruptly, he went limp in his chair. 'I thought she left a list here and a programme,' he said, eyes now on the floor. Humphrey's practised eye ran swiftly over the double row of pigeonholes before him. 'Right you are!' he exclaimed. It was a quarter past eleven that night when Humphrey scrawled his last 'O.K.'; stretched out his long form in his swivel chair; yawned; said, 'Well, _that's_ done, thank God!'; and hummed and tapped out on his bare desk the refrain of a current song:-- 'But you'd look sweet On the seat Of a bicycle built for two.' He turned on Henry with a wrinkly, comfortable grin. 'Well, my boy, it's too late for Stanley's but what do you say to a bite at Ericson's, over by the tracks?' Then he became fully aware of the woebegone look of the boy, fiddling eternally with that moustache, fingering the leaves of his little book, and added:-- 'What on earth is the matter with you!' Henry gazed long at his book, swallowed, and said weakly:-- 'I'm in trouble, Humphrey.' 'Oh, come, not so bad as all--' He was silenced by the sudden plaintive appeal on Henry's face. Mr Boice, a huge-slow-moving figure of a man with great white whiskers, was coming in from the press room. They walked down to the little place by the tracks. Humphrey had a roast-beef sandwich and coffee; Henry gloomily devoured two cream puffs. There Humphrey drew out something of the story. It was difficult at first. Henry could babble forth his most sacred inner feelings with an ingenuous volubility that would alarm a naturally reticent man, and he could be bafflingly secretive. To-night he was both, and neither. He was full of odd little spiritual turnings and twistings--vague as to the clock, intent on justifying himself, submerged in a boundless bottomless sea of self-pity. Humphrey, touched, even worried, finally went at him with direct questions, and managed to piece out the incident of the Thursday morning in the boy's room. 'But I never asked her in,' he hurried to explain. 'She came in. Maybe after that it was my fault, but I didn't ask her in.' 'But as far as I can see, Hen, it wasn't so serious. You didn't make love to her.' 'I tried to.' 'Oh yes. She doubtless expected that. But she got away.'