An Ambitious Man

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

good taste and another reason had caused her to avoid him as much as

possible in the house. He seldom saw more than a passing glimpse of

her in the halls, and frequently whole days elapsed that he met her

only in the office. The young man never suspected that this fact was

due in great part to the suggestion of jealousy in the manner of the

Baroness toward the young girl ever after he had shown so much

interest in her welfare. Sensitive to the mental atmosphere about

her, as a wind harp to the lightest breeze, Berene felt this

unexpressed sentiment in the breast of her "benefactress" and strove

to avoid anything which could aggravate it.

With a lagging step and a listless air, Preston made his way up the

first of two flights of stairs which intervened between the street

door and his room. The first floor was in darkness; but in the upper

hall a dim light was always left burning until his return. As he

reached the landing, he was startled to see a woman's form lying at

the foot of the attic stairs, but a few feet from the door of his

room. Stooping down, he uttered a sudden exclamation of pained

surprise, for it was upon the pallid, unconscious face of Berene

Dumont that his eyes fell. He lifted the lithe figure in his sinewy

arms, and with light, rapid steps bore her up the stairs and in

through the open door of her room.