Lester's valiant heart, Lester's manly hands that had acted as a muff on a Riverside Drive bus, trembled and stiffened. "_It 'pullulates and blooms in sultry rhyme_," she quoted gayly. "Now what do you make of that, as referring to Mr. Arundel's heart? Sultry is right, too!" Lion-hearted Harvard, oak-bosomed Balliol, and all the mature essences of manhood were needed to keep Lester calm. How had she seen these secret strains? She must have been peeping into the chief's private correspondence. He hesitated during six inches of spaghetti. "Search me!" he said. "Is it in Walter Mason?"
"No, it's his own stuff, I tell you. _O beauteous rose! O shrub without a thorn!_" she chanted, and her laughter popped like a champagne cork. The horrid truth burst upon him. The boss was courting the angel of the office with the very ammunition that Lester himself had furnished, and his vow of secrecy forbade him to disclose the truth. Oh, the paltry meanness of fate, the villainy of circumstance! It is impossible to describe the pangs it cost him to dissemble, cloak, disguise, and conceal the anguish he felt. But dissemble, cloak, disguise, and conceal he did, and though his heart glowed like an angry cigar stub, he reached home at last.
There he sat down at his table, and amid the healthy snores of his roommates he concocted a fine piece of literary ordnance. Late and grimly he toiled and contrived. At length he had fashioned a sonnet which would be the golden sum and substance of the previous sequence; a cry of the heart so splendidly forensic that Mr. Arundel would pounce upon it, yielding his crisp steel engraving in return. But see, the asp concealed in the basket of fruit, the adder in the woodpile! Read Lester's sonnet as an acrostic:
Over that trellis where the moon distills
My heart is climbing like a rambler rose:
You lean and listen to the whippoorwills,
Heedless of how the fragrant blossom grows!
O beauteous rose! O shrub without a thorn!
I touch the windowsill with heart forlorn,
Hoping the guerdon of thy bounteous youth.
Troubled by woes that cicatrize and burn,
Yearning thy maiden bliss--I yearn, I yearn!
The discerning reader will spot the glittering falchion of malice lurking in the initial letters. Read them downward, they convey: _o my how I hate you!_ Lester had but to convey this poisoned comfit to his chief: then, playing upon the artless Pearl, persuade her to show it to him--point out the murderous duplicity of the love token; and she would recoil into his arms. Greenwich Village would sound the timbrel of joy, and even the _Oblique_ might find a softer-hearted papyrus vendor. _Vos plaudite!_ With such thoughts, amid the wailing matin song of boarding-house steam pipes, our hero fell into a brief slumber.