Henry, I am certain, thought of Mr Boice at this moment with about as much sympathy as a native of a jungle village might feel for a man-eating tiger. That look about Miss Dittenhoefer's mouth when she smiled! It was a world, this of placid-appearing Sunbury and the big city, just below the town line, in which men fought each other to the death, in which young boys were hardened and coarsened and taught to kill or be killed, in which women were tortured by hard masters until their souls cried out. Boice, I am sure, sensed nothing of this somewhat morbid hostility. No; until Robert A. McGibbon turned up in Sunbury, Mr Boice had some reason to feel settled and complacent in his years. His private funds were secure in his wife's name. And he had every reason to believe that, before many months more, it would be his privilege and pleasure to run McGibbon out of town for good. If the matter of Miss Dittenhoefer should, for a little while, stir up sentimental criticism, why--well, it was business. Sound business. And you couldn't go back of sound business. Henry sighed, got slowly up, had his meal ticket punched at the desk by Mrs Stanley, went back to the office. 2 The sunny, listless July day was at its lowest ebb--when men who had the time dawdled and smoked late over their lunch, when ladies took naps. Flies crawled languidly about the speckled walls of the _Voice_ office. Outside the screen door and the plate-glass front window, the hot air, rising from the cement sidewalk, quivered so that the yellow outlines of the Sunbury House across the street wavered unstably, and the dusty trees over there wavered, and the men sitting coatless, suspendered, in the yellow rocking chairs on the long veranda, wavered. Through the open press-room door came the sound of one small job-press rumbling at a handbill job; the other presses were still. The compositors worked or idled without talking. Here in the office, Henry, tipped back in his kitchen chair before the inkstained, cluttered pine table by the end wall, coat off, limp wet handkerchief tucked carefully around his neck inside the collar, chewed a pencil, gazing now at the little pile of blank copy paper before him, now at a discouraged fly on the wall. Gradually the fly took on a perverse interest among his wandering, unhappy thoughts. Prompted, doubtless, by a sense of inner demoralisation that was now close to recklessness, he reached for a pen, filled it with ink, and shot a scattering volley at the slow-moving insect. At the roll-top desk by the press-room door, Humphrey Weaver, also coatless, cob pipe in mouth, long lean face wrinkled in the effort to keep his usually docile mind on its task, elbow on desk and long fingers spread through damp hair, was correcting proof.