"
He looked at the clock. It was half-past three. Marise had said she
would be there about four. He gave a calculating glance at the stack of
letters. He would never be able to get through those. "We'll have to get
a move on," he remarked. "Things got pretty well piled up while I was
away."
He began to dictate rapidly, steadily, the end of a sentence clearly in
his mind before he pronounced the first word. He liked to dictate and
enjoyed doing it well. The pale young stenographer bent over his
note-book, his disfigured face intent and serious.
"Turned out all right, Arthur has," thought Neale to himself. "I wasn't
so far off, when I thought of the business college for him." Then he
applied himself single-mindedly to his dictation, taking up one letter
after another, with hardly a pause in his voice. But for all his
diligence, he had not come to the bottom of the pile when four o'clock
struck; nor ten minutes later when, glancing out of the window, he saw
Marise and the children with Mr. Bayweather and the two other men coming
across the mill-yard. Evidently Mr. Bayweather had dropped in just as
they were going to start and had come along. He stopped dictating and
looked at the group with a certain interest. Marise and the children had
had a good deal to say yesterday about the newcomers to Crittenden's.
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