Your duties are evidently too hard for
you. You can leave the office at any time you wish. Good-night."
The girl shrank as if he had struck her, looked up at him with wide,
wondering eyes, waited for a moment as if expecting to be recalled,
then, as Mr Cheney wheeled his chair about and turned his back upon
her, she suddenly sped away without a word.
She left the office a few moments later; but it was not until after
eleven o'clock that she dragged herself up two flights of stairs
toward her room on the attic floor at the Palace. She had been
walking the streets like a mad creature all that intervening time,
trying to still the agonising pain in her heart. Preston Cheney had
long been her ideal of all that was noble, grand and good, she
worshipped him as devout pagans worshipped their sacred idols; and,
without knowing it, she gave him the absorbing passion which an
intense woman gives to her lover.
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.
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