"Yes, I'll call you." He opened the office door, and there was Sue Frost.

She was tall, and she was rather large-boned and muscular. Her suit was a simple hard weave, dark gray in color. She wore a flower in her hair, and she was altogether a strikingly handsome woman. At a guess, she was in her middle fifties. There was little or no softness to her, nothing of the fleshy and over-dressed motherliness that he saw in so many Committee women. Her legs were long, and, as she rose to her feet, her right hand lifted to welcome him in a forthright—almost masculine—handshake.

"Hello, Mr. Purcell," she said. Her voice was not overly expressive. "I hope you don't mind my showing up this way, unannounced."

"Not at all," he murmured. "Please sit down."

She reseated herself, crossed her legs, contemplated him. Her eyes, he noticed, were an almost colorless straw. A strong kind of substance, and highly polished.

"Cigarette?" He extended his case, and she accepted a cigarette with a nod of thanks. He took one also, feeling like a gauche young man in the company of an older and more experienced woman.

He couldn't help thinking that Sue Frost was the type of urbane career woman ultimately not proposed to by the hero of Blake-Moffet's packets. There was an unsympathetic firmness about her. She was decidedly not the girl from next door.

"Undoubtedly," Sue Frost began, "you recognize this." She unraveled the winding of a manila folder and displayed a sheaf of script. On the cover of the sheaf was his Agency's stamp; she had one of his packets, and she evidently had been reading it.

"Yes," he admitted. "That's one of ours."

Sue Frost leafed through the packet, then laid it down on Allen's desk. "Myron accepted this last month. Then he had qualms and he sent it along the line to me. I had a chance to go over it this weekend."