Miss Margery drove daily in good weather, but on this crisp January morning her outing had an objective other than the spectacular. When the clean-limbed Kentuckian had measured the length of Main Street, he was sent on across the railroad tracks into the industrial half of the town, and was finally halted in front of the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works.
Raymer was at his desk when the smart equipage drew up before the office door; and a moment later he was at the curb, bareheaded, offering to help the daughter of men out of the robe wrappings.
"Perhaps I'd better not get out," she said. "Duke doesn't stand well. Can I see Mr. Edward Raymer for a minute or two?"
Raymer bowed and blushed a little. He knew her so well, by eye-intimacy at least, that he had been sure she knew him in the same way--as indeed she did.
"I--that is my name. What can I do for you, Miss Grierson?"
"Oh, _thank_ you," she burst out, with exactly the proper shade of impulsiveness. "Do you know, I was really afraid I might have to introduce myself? I----"
The interruption was of Raymer's making. One of his employees appearing opportunely, he sent the man to the horse's head, and once more held out his hands to Miss Grierson.
"You must come in and get warm," he insisted. "I am sure you have found it very cold driving this morning. Let me help you."
She made a driver's hitch in the reins and let him lift her to the sidewalk. The ease with which he did it gave her a pleasant little thrill of the sort that comes with the realization of a thing hoped for. When she was not too busy with the social triumphs, strength, manly strength, was a passion with Miss Grierson.
Raymer held the office door open for her, and in the grimy little den which had been his father's before him, placed a chair for her at the desk-end.
"Now you can tell me in comfort what I can do for you," he said, bridging the interruption.
"Oh, it's only a little thing. I came to see you about renting a pew in St. John's; that is our church, you know."
Raymer did not know, but he was politic enough not to say so.
"I am quite at your service," he hastened to say. "Shall I show you a plan of the sittings?"
She protested prettily that it wasn't at all necessary; that any assignment agreeable to him and least subversive of the rights and preferences of others would be quite satisfactory. But he got out the blue-print plan and dusted it, and in the putting together of heads over it many miles in the gap of unacquaintance were safely and swiftly flung to the rear.