That's to show it isn't the intelligent compositor's mistake, you see!" Then there was a familiar and masterful footstep on the stairs, and the attention of both of them wavered.
IV Arthur Dayson and his proof-correcting lost all interest and all importance for Hilda as Mr.Cannon came into the room.

The unconscious, expressive gesture, scornful and abrupt, with which she neglected them might have been terribly wounding to a young man more sensitive than Dayson.

But Dayson, in his self-sufficient, good-natured mediocrity, had the hide of an alligator.

He even judged her movement quite natural, for he was a flunkey born.

Hilda gazed at her master with anxiety as he deposited his black walking-stick in the corner behind the door and loosed his white muffler and large overcoat (which Dayson called an 'immensikoff.') She thought the master looked tired and worried.
Supposing he fell ill at this supreme juncture! The whole enterprise would be scotched, and not forty Daysons could keep it going! The master was doing too much--law by day and journalism by night.