sweet voice commandeering the attention he wanted desperately
to keep upon what he meant to say to Potter.

Once before in his life he had suffered such an experience: that
of having his thoughts possessed, against his will, by a person
he did not know and did not care to know. It had followed his
happening to see an intoxicated truck-driver lying beneath an
overturned wagon. "Easy, boys! Don' mangle me!" the man kept
begging his rescuers. And Canby recalled how "Easy, boys! Don'
mangle me!" sounded plaintively in his ears for days, bothering
him in his work at the office. Remembering it now, he felt a
spiteful satisfaction in classing that obsession with this one.
It seemed at least a step toward teaching Miss Wanda Malone to
know her place.

But he got no respite from the siege, and was still incessantly
beleaguered when he encountered the marble severities of the
Pantheon Apartments' entrance hall and those of its field-marshal,
who paraded him stonily to the elevator. Mr. Potter's apartment was
upon the twelfth floor, a facet stated in a monosyllable by the
field-marshal, and confirmed, upon the opening of the cage at that
height, by Mr. Potter's voice melodiously belling a flourish of
laughter on the other side of a closed door bearing his card. It was
rich laughter, cadenced and deep and loud, but so musically
modulated that, though it might never seem impromptu, even old
Carson Tinker had once declared that he liked to listen to it almost
as much as Potter did.

Old Carson Tinker was listening to it now, as Canby discovered,
after a lisping Japanese had announced him at the doorway of a