She gets through quite soon--there's only just one single sheet of paper, and she folds it up and creases it hard like she's trying to mash it in two, and she jams it in an enveloper and seals the enveloper and shoves it into my waiting hand, and she says to me: "There! Now you take this note to the man you work for, immediately!" "Yassum," I says; "is they any answer to come back?" "Answer?" she says, "No--no--_no_--NO!" So I goes right out, leaving her still saying it at the top of her voice. It seems to me it's high time to go, if not higher. Besides, it's mighty hard trying to carry on a conversation with an overwrought-up lady which she has only got one word left in stock, which that one is a little short word like "No." So I takes my foot in my hand and I marvils thence from there fast as ever my willing legs can take me. And as I goes along on my way, speeding 'cross-town bound for our quarters, I'm trying to think of a stylish word which in times gone by I has heard some of the white folks use as a pet name for a note from one loving soul to another. Pretty soon it comes to me--_billet doux_! I stops right still where I is at: "Bill-Lee do, huh?" I says to myself. "Yas, sometimes Bill-Lee do. But this time--glory, hallelujah, amen!--Bill-Lee do not!" CHAPTER XVIII _White Hopes_ When you is engaged in going to and fro in the world doing good deeds you certainly can cover a surpassing lot of ground in a short time. It's striking ten when I knocks at the lady's door; it ain't eleven yet, by the lacking of a few minutes, when I is home again and has handed over the note to Mr. Dallas and is watching his face whilst he reads it. He's got one of these here open faces, and I can tell, easy enough, exactly what thoughts goes through his mind. Mostly he's full of a great relief--that's plain to see--but mixed in with it is a faint kind of a lurking regretfulness that she should a-broke loose from him so abrupt this-a-way. If folks has got the least crumb of vanity in 'em it shows forth when a love affair is going to pieces on 'em. And Mr. Dallas is not no mite different in this matter from the run of creation. Even so, he's displayed more joysomeness than anything else when it comes to the end of what she's wrote him. He reaches out after my hand for to shake it good and hard and hearty. "Jeff," he says, "my hat's off to you--you're the outstanding wonder of the century. I judge it's hardly necessary for me to tell you what's in this note?" "I been able," I says, "to mek my own calculations, suh. I reckins ef I wuz put to it, I could guess." "How did you ever succeed in doing it?" he says. "Mr. Dallas," I says, "the main p'int is 'at it's done--ain't 'at so, suh?" "Agreed," he says; "but there are hints here--hints is a mild word--at things I don't in the least understand. Now, for example----"