Augusta did not miss Wardwell until evening. When he did not appear for supper, she ran up the stairs to bring him, thinking that he had perhaps fallen asleep. She had been busying herself through the afternoon, putting off the inevitable. And now she decided that it could be put off for still a little longer. She need not speak just yet. His door stood open, but Jimmie was not there. She wondered that he should have gone out today, for she knew he was tired. But, maybe, he had just gone down to the street, and perhaps he would be coming in any minute. She lingered a little, looking around at the signs of Jimmie's ways--a pair of shoes in the middle of the floor, a coat draped perilously from the arm of a chair, a necktie festooning a doorknob, for Jimmie, while he was always wholesomely clean, was certainly not orderly. And then the loose, scrambled piles of papers all over his desk. She had often wanted to fuss among them, to straighten them out and make neat piles of them. But she had learned that this was one of the points on which Jimmie would fight. Anyone might hide his shoes away or hang up his coat or take his neckties away to press, but touch that desk and he would roar. And she had always understood and loved the little boyish jealousy with which he guarded everything he wrote until it was printed. She went over on tiptoe, to take just a peep at what was on the typewriter. As if he had known that she would do just this, the words flashed cruelly up at her from the middle of the white paper: "I am going away, on urgent business--I am very tired." Augusta sank down into the chair, covering the words with her arm, sobbing: "Oh, Jimmie, Jimmie, did you have to hurt me this way! I wouldn't have tried to hold you. I would have let you go, and blessed you for the dear good boy you've been to me. I know you were tired. But you didn't need to hurt me!" After a little she sat up and forced herself to look at the line of words as they stared up at her. And as she studied them she found herself listening for the sound of Jimmie's voice saying them. Then she knew why Jimmie had written the words instead of saying them to her. _She would not have believed him._ And Jimmie had known that. Word by word and tone by tone, she made him say it over to her mind's ear and eye, even to the little lift in his shoulder with which he would have ended--And she knew! Jimmie did not mean that at all. He did not want to go away from her! "Urgent business!" Love laughed up in her heart. Jimmie and urgent business! And then the quiet, thinking Augusta came back. This was no caprice, no mere whim of Jimmie's. He had tried to make her believe that he was tired and only wanted escape. He had deliberately tried to hurt her so that she would believe. Jimmie would not have done that without a powerful reason.