On her own part, however, Ethel found him trying. He was promptly at her gate every morning to accompany her to work; and at night he escorted her home. It had been like that when they went to school together. But Ethel felt altogether different about it now. She did not like to be made conspicuous or to be appropriated in such a fashion. And when Benway undertook to go to lunch with her, she put her foot down firmly. Yet, she could not hurt his feelings. Because of his affliction she had been all her life striving to be particularly kind to Benway. From her earliest remembrance, when she had felt spasms of pity and sympathy for her little playmate and had impulsively run to him to pat his cheek and say, “Poor, poor Bennie!” to this very chance she had begged for him with the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company, Ethel Clayton had mothered the boy. Naturally and quite unconsciously he took advantage of her kindness. She shrank from having the rest of the office force suspect any tender relation between herself and the boy. “Boy” was of course the term in which she thought of him. And when he undertook to time his absence from the office so as to accompany her to the restaurant which she usually patronized, she had to put a stop to that. She quietly inaugurated a system of “taking turn about” for lunch hour which pretty well put it out of Benway’s power to leave at the same time she did. Likewise, she went farther away, to the Orleans Tea Room, instead of to the place at which it was the custom of most of the Hapwood-Diller office force to have their midday meal. The tea room was a more expensive place and was largely patronized by “up town” folk; and it was because of this change in her habits that Ethel chanced to learn, not two weeks after the manager’s departure for the training camp, something that she thought really did not concern her, but which interested her immensely, as it was connected with Frank Barton. She saw one noon a gaily, though beautifully, dressed and unmistakable figure entering the tea room ahead of her--that of Helen Fuller. Her escort was Morrison Copley--one of those men whose names made Ethel’s lips involuntarily curl. And yet, as far as Ethel Clayton knew, there was nothing bad about Morry Copley. She considered it a misfortune that the only empty table should be next the one occupied by those two from what Macon Hammerly called “the swagger part of town.” Miss Fuller looked the employee of the Hapwood-Diller Company over with a cold disdain which might have hurt cruelly a supersensitive soul. Ethel’s was too well balanced a nature to be disturbed by the ill breeding of the other girl. “You boys are going to be _terribly_ put to it for styles this fall,” Helen was drawling, her elbows on the table and her hands cupped to hold her pretty chin. Somebody had told her that the pose became her. “Everything offered for masculine wear will have a military cut.”