Mr. Coleman did not come into the office during the following week, and one day a newspaper item, under the heading of "The Smart Set," jumped at Susan with the familiar name. "Peter Coleman, who is at present the guest of Mrs. Rodney Chauncey, at her New Year's house party," it ran, "may accompany Mr. Paul Wallace and Miss Isabel Wallace in a short visit to Mexico next week." The news made Susan vaguely unhappy.
One January Saturday she was idling along the deck, when he came suddenly up behind her, to tell her, with his usual exuberant laughter, that he WAS going away for a fortnight with the Wallaces, just a flying trip, "in the old man's private car." He expected "a peach of a time."
"You certainly ought to have it!" smiled Susan gallantly, "Isabel Wallace looks like a perfect darling!"
"She's a wonder!" he said absently, adding eagerly, "Say, why can't you come and help me buy some things this afternoon? Come on, and we'll have tea at the club?"
Susan saw no reason against it, they would meet at one.
"I'll be down in J.G.'s office," he said, and Susan went back to her desk with fresh joy and fresh pain at her heart.
On Saturdays, because of the early closing, the girls had no lunch hour. But they always sent out for a bag of graham crackers, which they nibbled as they worked, and, between eleven and one, they took turns at disappearing in the direction of the lunch-room, to return with well scrubbed hands and powdered noses, fresh collars and carefully arranged hair. Best hats were usually worn on Saturdays, and Susan rejoiced that she had worn her best to-day. After the twelve o'clock whistle blew, she went upstairs.
On the last flight, just below the lunch-room, she suddenly stopped short, her heart giving a sick plunge. Somebody up there was laughing--crying--making a horrible noise--! Susan ran up the rest of the flight.
Thorny was standing by the table. One or two other girls were in the room, Miss Sherman was mending a glove, Miss Cashell stood in the roof doorway, manicuring her nails with a hairpin. Miss Elsie Kirk sat in the corner seat, with her arm about the bowed shoulders of another girl, who was crying, with her head on the table.
"If you would mind your own affairs for about five minutes, Miss Thornton," Elsie Kirk was saying passionately, as Susan came in, "you'd be a good deal better off!"