I'm losing my hold of my men." "Oh, I can't imagine your doing that, Burke." He turned on her to see if she were really daring to laugh at him, and met an eye as steady as his own.
"I guess I'm wasting my time here," he said, and something intimated that some one would pay for that expenditure.
"Shall I take a message to Mr.Farron for you ?" said Adelaide.
He nodded.
"Yes.

Tell him that if I'm to go, I'll go to-day." "I see." She rose slowly, as if in response to a vague, amusing caprice.
"Just that.

If you go, you'll go to-day." For the first time Burke, regaining his self-confidence, saw that she was not an enemy, but an appreciative spectator, and his face broke up in a smile, queer, crooked, wrinkled, but brilliant.
"I guess you'll get it about right," he said, and no compliment had ever pleased Adelaide half so much.
"I think so," she confidently answered, and then at the door she turned.

"Oh, Mrs.Baxter," she said, "this is Marty Burke, a very important person." Importance, especially Adelaide Farron's idea of importance, was a category for which Mrs.Baxter had the highest esteem, so almost against her will she looked at Burke, and found him looking her over with such a shrewd eye that she looked away, and then looked back again to find that his gaze was still upon her.

He had made his living since he was a child by his faculty for sizing people up, and at his first glimpse of Mrs.
Baxter's shifting glance he had sized her up; so that now, when she remarked with an amiability at once ponderous and shaky that it was a very fine day, he replied in exactly the same tone, "It is that," and began to walk about the room looking at the pictures.