"He says he's coming in anyway, but he'd rather have your permission."
"Did you tell him I was busy?" she asked.
"Yes'm, but he said he was coming just the same."
She made no answer, and the boy, his eyes shining with admiration for the importunate visitor, rattled on.
"I know'm. He's a awful big guy. If he started roughhousing he could clean the whole office out. He's young Glendon, who won the fight last night."
"Very well, then. Bring him in. We don't want the office cleaned out, you know."
No greetings were exchanged when Glendon entered. She was as cold and inhospitable as a gray day, and neither invited him to a chair nor recognized him with her eyes, sitting half turned away from him at her desk and waiting for him to state his business. He gave no sign of how this cavalier treatment affected him, but plunged directly into his subject.
"I want to talk to you," he said shortly. "That fight. It did end in that round."
"You didn't," he retorted. "You didn't. I didn't."
She turned and looked at him with quiet affectation of boredom.
"What is the use?" she asked. "Prize-fighting is prize-fighting, and we all know what it means. The fight did end in the round I told you it would."
"It did," he agreed. "But you didn't know it would. In all the world you and I were at least two that knew Powers wouldn't be knocked out in the sixteenth."
"I say you knew he wouldn't." He spoke peremptorily, and, when she still declined to speak, stepped nearer to her. "Answer me," he commanded.
"He wasn't. He wasn't knocked out at all. Do you get that? I am going to tell you about it, and you are going to listen. I didn't lie to you. Do you get that? I didn't lie to you. I was a fool, and they fooled me, and you along with me. You thought you saw him knocked out. Yet the blow I struck was not heavy enough. It didn't hit him in the right place either. He made believe it did. He faked that knockout."
He paused and looked at her expectantly. And somehow, with a leap and thrill, she knew that she believed him, and she felt pervaded by a warm happiness at the reinstatement of this man who meant nothing to her and whom she had seen but twice in her life.
"Well?" he demanded, and she thrilled anew at the compellingness of him.