"There!" I cried, throwing that awful paper on the desk before him. "Now cinch 'em, Fred Obermuller, as they cinched you. It'll be the holiest blackmail that ever--oh, and will you pay for the hansom?" XVI. I don't remember much about the first part of the lunch. I was so hungry I wanted to eat everything in sight, and so happy that I couldn't eat a thing. But Mr. O. kept piling the things on my plate, and each time I began to talk he'd say: "Not now--wait till you're rested, and not quite so famished." I laughed. "Do I eat as though I was starved?" "You--you look tired, Nance." "Well," I said slowly, "it's been a hard week." "It's been hard for me, too; harder, I think, than for you. It wasn't fair to me to let me--think what I did and say what I did. I'm so sorry, Nance,--and ashamed. So ashamed! You might have told me." "And have you put your foot down on the whole thing; not much!" He laughed. He's got such a boyish laugh in spite of his chin and his eye-glasses and the bigness of him. He filled my glass for me and helped me again to the salad. Oh, Mag, it's such fun to be a woman and have a man wait on you like that! It's such fun to be hungry and to sit down to a jolly little table just big enough for two, with carnations nodding in the tall slim vase, with a fat, soft-footed, quick-handed waiter dancing behind you, and something tempting in every dish your eye falls on. It's a gay, happy, easy world, Maggie darlin'. I vow I can't find a dark corner in it--not to-day. None but the swellest place in town was good enough, Obermuller had said, for us to celebrate in. The waiters looked queerly at us when we came in--me in my dusty shoes and mussed hair and old rig, and Mr. O. in his working togs. But do you suppose we cared? He was smoking and I was pretending to eat fruit when at last I got fairly launched on my story. He listened to it all with never a word of interruption. Sometimes I thought he was so interested that he couldn't bear to miss a word I said. And then again I fancied he wasn't listening at all to me; only watching me and listening to something inside of himself. Can you see him, Mag, sitting opposite me there at the pretty little table, off in a private room by ourselves? He looked so big and strong and masterful, with his eyes half closed, watching me, that I hugged myself with delight to think that I--I, Nancy Olden, had done something for him he couldn't do for himself. It made me so proud, so tipsily vain, that as I leaned forward eagerly talking, I felt that same intoxicating happiness I get on the stage when the audience is all with me, and the two of us--myself and the many-handed, good-natured other fellow over on the other side of the footlights--go careering off on a jaunt of fun and fancy, like two good playmates. He was silent a minute when I got through. Then he laid his cigar aside and stretched out his hand to me. "And the reason, Nance--the reason for it all?"