Involuntarily he drew her closer, with a gentle, steady pressure. At this she raised her eyelids and gazed at him for a moment, contemplatively first and then passively curious, after which she lowered the lids again, while her lips half parted in a voiceless sigh.
So far as Hampstead was concerned, illusion had gone. He knew that he was just a man. So far as Miss Dounay was concerned, he suspected that she was just a woman. But devotion remained. John did not relax his hold. Instead there was a momentary tightening of his arms.
"Let 'er go," called the low, tense voice of Mowrey; and with a rustling sound the great curtain slipped slowly upward.
The week went by like a shot. On Sunday night the glory that was a very stagy Rome burned down for the last time beneath the gridiron of the old Burbank Theater. On Monday morning no odor of grease paint and no noxious smell of stewing glue, which proclaims the scene painter at his work, was in the nostrils of John. Instead, the clack of typewriters, the tinkle of telephone bells, the droning voices of dictators, and the shuffling feet of office boys filled his ears.
As if to completely re-merge the man in his environment, Robert Mitchell came walking in, tossed a bundle of papers upon the desk, fixed the rate clerk with a shaft of his blue eye, and commanded drily:
"Ursus! Make a set of tariffs embracing our new lines to correspond with the commodity tariffs of the San Francisco and El Paso."
John colored slightly at the thrust of that name Ursus, but looked Mr. Mitchell fairly and meekly in the eye and answered:
"Have them effective July 1st," concluded the General Freight Agent, as he turned away.
Burman, the lordly through rate clerk, lowered his sleek face behind his books and snickered. John shot a scowl at Burman and then for a few minutes hunched his shoulders over the documents in the case.
The California Consolidated was being consolidated some more. Two more roads in the big system had just been pitchforked into the jurisdiction of Robert Mitchell, adding twelve hundred additional miles to his responsibility and pushing him several swift rounds up the ladder of promotion.
These additions made the California Consolidated competitive with the San Francisco and El Paso lines at hundreds of new stations. John's job was to consolidate the freight tariffs of the three lines and make sure that they equalized the rates of the competitor at competing stations. It was an enormous task, and the General Freight Agent had breezily commanded it to be done in ten weeks. That was why Burman snickered. It was also why Hampstead scowled.