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The door opened lightly. The editor was conscious of a faint odor of scented soap, a sensation of freshness and cleanliness, the impression of a soft hand like a woman’s on his shoulder and, like a woman’s, momentarily and playfully caressing, the passage of a graceful shadow across his desk, and the next moment Jack Hamlin was ostentatiously dusting a chair with an open newspaper preparatory to sitting down.

“You ought to ship that office-boy of yours, if he can’t keep things cleaner,” he said, suspending his melody to eye grimly the dust which Mr. Bowers had shaken from his departing feet.

The editor did not look up until he had finished revising a difficult paragraph. By that time Mr. Hamlin had comfortably settled himself on a cane sofa, and, possibly out of deference to his surroundings, had subdued his song to a peculiarly low, soft, and heartbreaking whistle as he unfolded a newspaper. Clean and faultless in his appearance, he had the rare gift of being able to get up at two in the afternoon with much of the dewy freshness and all of the moral superiority of an early riser.

“You ought to have been here just now, Jack,” said the editor.

“Not a row, old man, eh?” inquired Jack, with a faint accession of interest.

“No,” said the editor, smiling. Then he related the incidents of the previous interview, with a certain humorous exaggeration which was part of his nature. But Jack did not smile.

“You ought to have booted him out of the ranch on sight,” he said. “What right had he to come here prying into a lady’s affairs?–at least a lady as far as HE knows. Of course she’s some old blowzy with frumpled hair trying to rope in a greenhorn with a string of words and phrases,” concluded Jack, carelessly, who had an equally cynical distrust of the sex and of literature.

“That’s about what I told him,” said the editor.

“That’s just what you SHOULDN’T have told him,” returned Jack. “You ought to have stuck up for that woman as if she’d been your own mother. Lord! you fellows don’t know how to run a magazine. You ought to let ME sit on that chair and tackle your customers.”

“What would you have done, Jack?” asked the editor, much amused to find that his hitherto invincible hero was not above the ordinary human weakness of offering advice as to editorial conduct.

“Done?” reflected Jack. “Well, first, sonny, I shouldn’t keep a revolver in a drawer that I had to OPEN to get at.”

“But what would you have said?”

“I should simply have asked him what was the price of lumber at Mendocino,” said Jack, sweetly, “and when he told me, I should have said that the samples he was offering out of his own head wouldn’t suit. You see, you don’t want any trifling in such matters. You write well enough, my boy,” continued he, turning over his paper, “but what you’re lacking in is editorial dignity. But go on with your work. Don’t mind me.”

Thus admonished, the editor again bent over his desk, and his friend softly took up his suspended song. The editor had not proceeded far in his corrections when Jack’s voice again broke the silence.

“Where are those d—-d verses, anyway?”

Without looking up, the editor waved his pencil towards an uncut copy of the “Excelsior Magazine” lying on the table.

“You don’t suppose I’m going to READ them, do you?” said Jack, aggrievedly. “Why don’t you say what they’re about? That’s your business as editor.”

But that functionary, now wholly lost and wandering in the non-sequitur of an involved passage in the proof before him, only waved an impatient remonstrance with his pencil and knit his brows. Jack, with a sigh, took up the magazine.

A long silence followed, broken only by the hurried rustling of sheets of copy and an occasional exasperated start from the editor. The sun was already beginning to slant a dusty beam across his desk; Jack’s whistling had long since ceased. Presently, with an exclamation of relief, the editor laid aside the last proof-sheet and looked up.