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The hour when he knew they were passing under the latter's eyes was now becoming intolerable to Betton, and it was a profound relief when the secretary, suddenly advised of his father's illness, asked permission to absent himself for a fortnight.
This was the confession that, reluctantly, yet with a kind of white-lipped bravado, he flung at Betton in answer to the latter's tentative suggestion that, really, the letter-answering job wasn't worth bothering him with a thing that any type-writer could do. "If you mean you're paying me more than it's worth, I'll take less," Vyse rushed out after a pause.
"Oh you keep them, do you?" said Vyse simply. "I well some of them; a few of the funniest only." Vyse slipped off the band and began to open the letters. While he was glancing over them Betton again caught his own reflection in the glass, and asked himself what impression he had made on his visitor.
But a pang of compunction shot through him as he remembered the manuscript of "The Lifted Lamp" gathering dust on his table for half a year. "Not that it would have made any earthly difference since he's evidently never been able to get the thing published." But this reflection did not wholly console Betton, and he found it impossible, at the moment, to tell Vyse that his services were not needed.
Betton studied the ironic "Unknown" for an appreciable space of time; then he broke into a laugh. He had suddenly recalled Vyse's similar experience with "Hester Macklin," and the light he was able to throw on that obscure episode was searching enough to penetrate all the dark corners of his own adventure.
One evening, finding himself unexpectedly disengaged, he asked Vyse to dine; it had occurred to him that, in the course of an after-dinner chat, he might delicately hint his feeling that the work he had offered his friend was unworthy so accomplished a hand. Vyse surprised him by a momentary hesitation. "I may not have time to dress." Betton stared. "What's the odds?
Wilson and Mr. Betton, in mentioning Mr. Mason's contemporaries at the bar. They were near his own age, and both well known as lawyers and public men. Mr. Mason, while yet in New Hampshire, found himself engaged in causes in which that illustrious man, Samuel Dexter, also appeared. The late Mr.
But one morning, about three weeks later, the latter asked for a word with his employer, and Betton, on entering the library, found his secretary with half a dozen documents spread out before him. "What's up?" queried Betton, with a touch of impatience. Vyse was attentively scanning the outspread letters. "I don't know: can't make out." His voice had a faint note of embarrassment.
It brought in, on the glitter of sun, all the shrill crisp morning noises those piercing notes of the American thoroughfare that seem to take a sharper vibration from the clearness of the medium through which they pass. Betton raised himself languidly. That was the voice of Fifth Avenue below his windows.
DURING the ensuing weeks the letters grew fewer and fewer, and Betton foresaw the approach of the fatal day when his secretary, in common decency, would have to say: "I can't draw my pay for doing nothing." What a triumph for Vyse! The thought was intolerable, and Betton cursed his weakness in not having dismissed the fellow before such a possibility arose.
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