It was only now that he had treated her with such rough brutality,
and discharged her from his employ for so slight a cause, that the
knowledge burst upon her tortured heart of all he was to her.

She paused at the foot of the third and last flight of stairs with a
strange dizziness in her head and a sinking sensation at her heart.

A little less than half-an-hour afterwards Preston Cheney unlocked
the street door and came in for the night. He had done double his
usual amount of work and had finished his duties earlier than usual.
To avoid thinking after he sent Berene away, he had turned to his
desk and plunged into his labour with feverish intensity. He wrote a
particularly savage editorial on the matter of over-immigration, and
his leaders on political questions of the day were all tinctured with
a bitterness and sarcasm quite new to his pen. At midnight that pen
dropped from his nerveless hand, and he made his way toward the
Palace in a most unenviable state of mind and body.

Yet he believed he had done the right thing both in engaging himself
to Miss Lawrence and in discharging Berene. Her constant presence
about the office was of all things the most undesirable in his new
position.

"But I might have done it in a decent manner if I had not lost all
control of myself," he said as he walked home. "It was brutal the
way I spoke to her; poor child, she looked as if I had beat her with
a bludgeon. Well, it is just as well perhaps that I gave her good
reason to despise me."

Since Berene had gone into the young man's office as an employe her