half in the air, at the point where the uprolling earth revolved against the broad-open casement of the morning sky. Appearing for a moment as a fantasy, it soon settled into a lengthening white saw-blade of joined buildings, low in the distance, dividing the solid green world from the dreamy firmament of a June dawn. Straight toward it rushed the cleaving bullet of the train.

Her head out beneath the raised window-sash, her companion forgotten as though he had never existed, Daisy wrapped herself in the joy of the hour. The white house-line, advancing along the angle of its perspective, broadened and took form and character, split into rays of streets, discovered great chimneys with smoke-plumes, unveiled square buildings in a caparison of glittering windows, began to live and move and give forth human signs. The first workers were already in the streets, for a goose-herd of city whistles was croaking out seven, vying therein with the warning blast of the "flyer's" engine as, barely slackening speed, it rushed along the cobweb of tracks, arrogant and favored possessor, for the time being, of the right of way to the great urban station in the heart of all.

"Well, kid," said the voice of Beatty, "how d'ye like it?"

"Fine, Freddie," Daisy replied, blithely. The comment was plain and simple enough; but her eyes and cheeks told the rest, without need of words.

Beatty stuck on his hat, tilting it a little.

"It ain't so bad, either," he conceded, grinning to himself, as he picked up his smart leather suitcase and Daisy's battered telescope grip, "not so bad, at that, kiddo."

With a hollow, drumlike roar, the train drew to a halt beneath a dome of glass and iron; and Daisy and her companion, inching along behind the file of passengers, at length emerged upon a cement walk, walled in on either side by the bulk of varnished railway coaches. Passing along this, descending a stair with an iron balustrade, and proceeding through a great, busy, and echoing rotunda with a ceiling almost as far away as a sky, Daisy and her companion emerged upon a stretch of granolithic pavement.

Beyond the curb, a bevy of bus-drivers from city hotels crowed like a flock of roosters—the surmounting voice in this bedlam being that of a sandy-mustached old-timer, whose vehicle was labelled "Imperial Hotel." By his hind-wheel he stood, moving nothing but the hinges of his jaws; and to see his mouth open to its red limit was to be filled with consternation.

"Imm-Peary-ail Hoat'l!" he sang, his eyes looking nonchalantly up and away, with something of the expression he used to wear when scouting the sky for signs of rain, in the old farming days before he became poet laureate of the city's pioneer hotel.

"Why—look who's here, will you!" The exclamation was Beatty's, as he stopped alongside the scratched old bus. "This is him, Mrs. Beatty—old Jim-Jam Hogle. Can you take a passenger, J. J.?"

Mr. Hogle, without ceasing his vocal offices for so much as the fraction of a moment, let his eyes flicker down over Beatty with no sign of recognition, returned his gaze again to its former direction above the depot roof, and jerked his thumb casually toward the interior of his craft. Beatty handed the girl in, climbed in after her, and set down the suitcase and grip. No others entered; and presently Mr. Hogle, turning from his post by the wheel-rim and glancing inscrutably in at Daisy as he passed the glass panel behind where his two passengers sat, unsnapped and threw in his iron hitching-weight, climbed to his high seat, and rattled away.

Daisy Nixon had never before seen such crowds nor such coachmanship. With the horses trotting at a good speed, the old teamster wound in and out by motor-trucks, autos, street-cars, horse-drays, and thronging pedestrians, as smoothly, swiftly and carelessly as though he had the whole street to himself. The traffic grew less dense as they passed out of the vicinity of the depot, crossed a corner where the car-tracks met at right angles, and, after bowling for a block or two down the city's main thoroughfare, turned down a side street and drew up at the door of a hoary frame hotel, its white-painted two-tier piazza weathered to a dingy gray.

Beatty and Daisy descended; and the old bus-driver, after first hitching the team to the weight, followed with the grips.

"You wait in the hall here, while I go an' dicker with the clerk, dear," said Beatty, ostentatiously, "I'll be right back."

Daisy, looking about her curiously, encountered suddenly the eye of Mr. Hogle, standing up the hall, out of sight of the hotel office. The eye had been trying for some moments to catch hers; and, now that it had succeeded, Mr. Hogle raised a huge forefinger, stained indelibly with harness-oil, and beckoned. Daisy went over briskly.

"Missis Beatty, hey?" said Mr. Hogle, toning his great voice to a low interrogative rumble.

Daisy nodded a careless affirmative. It was none of his business. She felt able to take care of this point herself, when the time should arrive.

"Like hell you are," said the unmincing Mr. Hogle, "ner wun't be. Break away from him as soon's as you can—that's if it ain't too late already. I know him."

Daisy dimpled; raising her chin challengingly, after a manner she had. But she did not answer.

"I guess you're all right yet," said Mr. Hogle, after a shrewd fatherly glance, "an' I see you're one of them confident kind. Them's the ones that gets ketched easiest. Now you'll mind what I told you—won't you, Missie?"

Daisy, regarding her adviser with dancing eyes, bobbed her chin up and down in mock docility; and Mr. Hogle, shaking his head pessimistically, went out to put away his team.

"What was that old geezer saying?" said Beatty, coming out of the office as the old man went outside.

"I—I'm sure I don't know," said Daisy, gravely, "I think he was trying to make love to me, Freddie."

"Wants to get his can beat off, eh?" remarked Beatty, carelessly; "well, what-oh-what does my little girlie want worst, right now?"

"Breakfast," replied Daisy, plumply; ducking roguishly to avoid the caress her questioner, imagining that was the thing she "wanted worst," sought to bestow.

"A-all right," said Beatty, swallowing his pique; "we'll go and see if they can scare us up some poached-two-on, right now. Then 'm going to take my baby out an' show her the best time she ever had, in all her young life—eh?"

"M'h'm," murmured Daisy, smiling to herself, as she followed her companion into the dining-room.

Breakfast that morning was a notable affair, a milestone in Daisy Nixon's days. Not because there was anything novel or striking about the garniture of the Imperial Hotel dining-room, which was a plain homely place, differing little from the eating-room of the Jubilee House in Toddburn—but because there hummed, and called, and clanged, and whistled through the open windows the multitudinous sounds of this new urban life into which she had, as it were, plunged headlong. Daisy listened absently to Beatty's chatter, conceding him an occasional dimple or smile; but otherwise almost forgot him until, as the meal ended, he laid his hand, hot and moist, over hers, and said:

"Well, how does my little-one feel about it now?"

Daisy glanced down at his white-pored hand, with its cigarette-yellowed finger-tips and outstanding blue veins. Then she looked up at him, and leaned one pretty cheek coaxingly close.

"You's baby feels ashamed in this old waist and skirt and hat," she said, softly; "ain't you going to get her some nice things to be married in?"

Beatty's