"Thought you'd take it to headquarters, did you?" he said. "I advise you to drop it right here." He recoiled as she advanced, and warded an imaginary blow, but she only passed him by contemptuously. "Are you going to drop it?" he asked, following to the stairs. "I don't want to see you get into trouble, for all your nasty temper. I'm willing to overlook your striking me." His persistence only fixed her resolution to expose him, and she hurried on without reply. "Two can play at that game," he warned over the rail. In the street she paused irresolutely. The man would, of course, protect himself if he could, and her own story should reach some member of the firm to-night. If she waited till morning, Rose could easily forestall her. Yet she had become too sophisticated not to shrink from the idea of trying to take her grievance into one of those men's homes. Only the other day she had picked up a trashy paper containing a shop-girl story, warmly praised by Amy, which narrated an incident of the kind. The son and heir of a merchant prince--so the author styled him--had cruelly wronged the beautiful shop-girl, who, after harrowing sorrows, took her courage in her hands and braved the ancestral hall. She gained an entrance somehow (details were scanty here) and confronted the base son and heir at the climax of a grand ball at which the upper ten and other numerals were assembled to do honor to his chosen bride. Jean had seen the absurdity of the picture as Amy could not. Things did not fall out this wise in real life. The beautiful shop-girl would never have gotten by the merchant prince's presumably well-trained servants, even if she had eluded the specially detailed policeman at the awning, and Jean judged that her own chances would be as slender. Nevertheless, there seemed to be nothing left her but to try. She consulted a directory in the next drugstore and copied out the home addresses of the several members of the firm. One of the junior partners seemed to live nearest, though not within walking distance, and at this address she finally arrived at an hour when, judging Fifth Avenue by Mrs. St. Aubyn's, she feared she would find her employer at dinner. She recognized the house as one which Amy had pointed out with an air of proprietorship on their first Sunday walk, and she reflected with misgiving that it was a really plausible setting for the drama of the beautiful shop-girl, did such things exist.