"Why else should I come away over to Jersey City? Couldn't I have talked with you at the office?" This seemed convincing. She continued to study his face for light upon the real character of this strange new sort of man. He regarded her with a friendly humorous twinkle in his eyes. "Then I'll take you to him," she said at length. She was by no means satisfied, but she could not discover why she was dissatisfied. "I can't possibly do you any harm," he urged, with raillery. "No, I think not," replied she gravely. "But you mustn't say those things!" "Why not?" Into his eyes came their strongest, most penetrating look. "I want you. And I don't intend to give you up. It isn't my habit to give up. So, sooner or later I get what I go after." "You make me--afraid," she said nervously. "Of what?" laughed he. "Not of me, certainly. Then it must be of yourself. You are afraid you will end by wanting me to want you." "No--not that," declared she, confused by his quick cleverness of speech. "I don't know what I'm afraid of." "Then let's go to your father. . . . You'll not tell Tetlow what I've said?" "No." And once more her simple negation gave him a sense of her absolute truthfulness. "Or that I've been here?" She looked astonished. "Why not?" "Oh--office reasons. It wouldn't do for the others to know." She reflected on this. "I don't understand," was the result of her thinking. "But I'll do as you ask. Only, you must not come again." "Why not? If they knew at the office, they'd simply talk--unpleasantly." "Yes," she admitted hesitatingly after reflecting. "So you mustn't come again. I don't like some kinds of secrets." "But your father will know," he urged. "Isn't that enough for--for propriety?" "I can't explain. I don't understand, myself. I do a lot of things by instinct." She, standing with her hands behind her back and with clear, childlike eyes gravely upon him, looked puzzled but resolved. "And my instinct tells me not to do anything secret about you." This answer made him wonder whether after all he might not be too positive in his derisive disbelief in women's instincts. He laughed. "Well--now for your father." The workshop proved to be an annex to the rear, reached by a passage leading past a cosy little dining room and a kitchen where the order and the shine of cleanness were notable even to masculine eyes. "You are well taken care of," he said to her--she was preceding him to show the way. "We take care of ourselves," replied she. "I get breakfast before I leave and supper after I come home. Father has a cold lunch in the middle of the day, when he eats at all--which isn't often. And on Saturday afternoons and Sundays I do the heavy work." "You _are_ a busy lady!" "Oh, not so very busy. Father is a crank about system and order. He has taught me to plan everything and work by the plans."