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Updated: July 13, 2025
When her mind, anticipating the answering ring of the conductor's ticket-puncher, realized the mistake, she raised her head, then twisted back, electrically, as though some current had been passed through her body. Seated on the bench at the other side of the passage-way, was the man whom she had found in King Street outside the premises of Bonsfield & Co.
Why had he followed her? How had he known that she was employed in the exacting services of Bonsfield & Co.? All these questions gyrated wildly in her mind, swept about, confused at finding no plausible answers to their importunate demands. Then, lastly, who was he?
There the speed of his steps lessened and, walking past the premises of Bonsfield & Co., he kept his eyes in the direction of the window at which he had first seen Sally Bishop at work. She was there, her fingers more lively now than when he had seen them before, in their eternal dance upon the untiring keys.
It was as if not one evening, but three days, had passed by since she had left the office of Bonsfield & CO. the day they had dined together the day on which they had watched that terrible fight the day, the last of all, when she had awakened from unconsciousness, had struggled through a cruel agony of mind, and had finally said good-bye to him for ever.
In one of these offices off Covent Garden, under a green-shaded lamp that cast its metallic rays on to the typewriting machine before her, sat one of the young lady clerks in the establishment of Bonsfield & Co., a firm of book-buyers. They carried on a promiscuous trade with America and the Colonies, and managed, by the straining of ends, to meet their expenses and show a small margin of profit.
Before she left the office that evening, Sally picked up the volume of Who's Who? kept there mainly because Mr. Bonsfield had a brother whose name figured with some credit upon one of its pages. She turned quickly over the leaves, until the name of Traill leapt out from the print to hold her eye. "John Hewitt Traill" she read it with self-conscious interest "barrister-at-law and journalist.
"I know, but then I came out five minutes early." "Are they so fierce as that?" "Yes, I daren't be late. Mr. Bonsfield gives me his letters directly after lunch. I think he'd tell me I might go, if I was late. You see it's very easy for them to get a secretary, the work's not difficult though there's a lot of it; and there are hundreds of girls who'd be ready to fill my place in a moment."
For one moment it rose in the mind of Sally Bishop, as she turned into Bedford Street and directed her course towards Piccadilly Circus. It had crossed her mind in suspicion the uprush of an idea, as a bubble struggles to the surface that the man whom she had found waiting outside the premises of Bonsfield & Co. had had the intention in his mind to speak to her as she passed.
With these, perhaps a single hour is all that may be required for the seed to open, the shoots to sprout, the plant itself to bear the fruit of action in the fierce light of reality. In Traill's mind the idea was sown when he stood outside the office of Bonsfield & Co. in King Street. The soil was ready then hungry for the seed. It fell lightly unnoticed into the subconscious strata of his mind.
He still watched her until he had seen her place the wooden cover over the machine; then he crossed to the other side of the road and began walking up and down the pavement, passing the door of Bonsfield & Co. About every twenty yards or so, he turned and passed it again. Five minutes elapsed.
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