What do you have to do?"

"Oh, down't you know what service is?" her companion simulated surprise broadly; then, looking a little aside, as though addressing a third party, the sylph murmured: "Ow, the denseniss of the mahsses! It's a cortion, it is!"

After this soliloquy, she faced Daisy again, looking the girl up and down as through the mistress' lorgnette. "W'y", she said, "domestic service, I mean—service: I carn't use any other word—in some big 'ouse, with your two evenin's off a week, if you're a good bargainer, an' a charnce to have your comp'ny in the kitchin, when the Missis isn't abaout—she carn't always be on 'and, can she?"

Daisy was so attracted—not by the "company" aspect of the suggested vocation, as by the thought that she might not only view, but actually dwell in, some of the rich and romantic interiors she had seen in photoplays at Thompson's Hall in Toddburn, and perhaps have an adventure of her own in a "big 'ouse"—that she forgot to ask her companion the obvious question: why she herself was not 'in service'.

"I know a girl as is just leavin' her place," the sylph pursued; "I shall give you the address, if you wish, and phone her to be on the lookout, so you'll 'ave no trouble a-findin' the servants' entrance. 'Ave you a bit of pyper abaout you?"

Daisy fumbled in her telescope grip and brought out an old letter, from which she tore off the blank sheet. The sylph drew out of her coiffure a thin pencil that had been skewered there. In a leaning, long-lettered hand, she wrote a street name and number.

"There", she said, as she handed the scrap of paper to Daisy, "take a taxi—that's quickest, and it will save you arskin' your way. You'll do withaout references—the Missis in this place I'm sendin' you to is a bit of a soft un, and Annie will see to that paht of it. I say, I should nip out naow, if I were you," the sylph glanced at her wrist-watch, "while 'Ogle's away at the station with 'is bus. 'E just left as I came up. I shan't tell him where you've gone."

Daisy, her heart dancing with the spirit of adventure, went over to the looking-glass to do up her hair. After a glance into the mirror, she turned.

"I ought to have a clean blouse," she said; then in her spirit of blunt, brisk self-advantage, she added: "If you could lend me one, it would help, perhaps, to make sure I get the job."

The sylph's head came up with a snap.

"I shouldn't be surprised if it did 'elp," she fluted, "but I sharn't do it, just the same. W'y don't you arsk for the loan of my Sunday frock, and 'ave done with it? Arn't I helping you enough, as it is?"

Daisy, unabashed and with a little shrug, donned her slightly soiled waist and brushed the worst of the lint from her travel-wrinkled skirt. Then she picked up her telescope grip, and swung it gaily.

"Well, I'm off," was the verbal fashion of her parting, as she skipped down the stairs.

In spite of the sylph's assiduity of helpfulness, the latter made no particular demonstration of partiality as, from the head of the stairway, she watched the girl descend.

"Ee-yes," she murmured to herself, "they would put that saucy miss waitin' at table, in 'ere where my Bob is clerkin'. 'E's a bit rough at the start-off with the gels, Bob is—but 'e's dreadful soft-'artid when a gel once gets 'im gowing."

CHAPTER V. A Job.

Daisy Nixon flung out of the door of the Imperial Hotel into an afternoon world of dust and din and ecstasy. It was the hour when stenographers, in offices, whose high open windows command the streets with their emancipated pedestrians, begin to rubber over-shoulder at the clock, and to make excursions into washrooms to veneer the fresh color of cheek and chin and forehead with cadaverous conventional powder. The "boys" have been educated to look for this make-up (it takes an educated taste to appreciate it!) and a girl would as soon think of leaving the office in her stocking-feet, as without a blue-white effect on chin and nose and forehead, and a smudge of strangulation purple blotting the cheek's own inimitable rose.

Six o'clock would blow shortly from a hundred sirens; and the thrill of "quittin'-time" could already be discerned in the air. Down the street from the direction of the big transcontinental depot came a 'bus, three or four blocks away; and Daisy, with a habit of the countryside, identified this vehicle instantly by the team, whose markings she had instinctively remembered. It was the Imperial Hotel rig, returning from the station. No time, therefore, was to be lost, if she was to evade her self-appointed guardian, old Jim Hogle.

A rank of jitneys was parked along the curb. Daisy approached a driver with a mop of black curly hair so abundant that it pushed his cap to one side. This driver half-turned his head in a formal "straight business, and don't waste my time" way; but the corners of mouth and eye twinkled companionably and humorously.

"Could you", Daisy's eyes twinkled back, too, in spite of her trace of country-girl diffidence, "could you—"

"I should say I could," the chauffeur's face was expressionless, but his accent was merry.

"Could you", Daisy dimpled as she went on, "take me to here—see?"

The young man hitched his chin forward in ostentatious scrutiny. Then, in a matter-of-course way, he took the scrap of paper from Daisy's fingers, brought it to his lips, handed it back, clicked open the tonneau door, and motioned inward with hospitable palm.

"Thank a-you," he said, elaborately, as Daisy stepped in; then, without opening the fore-door, he vaulted into his own seat. There was the usual preliminary roar, proceeding by staccato jet and pit-a-pat to smooth pulsing motion, as the jitney glided out handily into the multifarious traffic of the street.

No river-ravine of Wheat-Land on a June Sunday had ever stirred Daisy Nixon to an atom of the ecstasy that champagned her as she sailed down that traffic-current between its Saguenay-banks of masonry, whose uneven summits, high above her, scissored the blue silk of the sky. Forward, upward to right, upward to left, the girl's glance travelled; then came down to the sidewalk, no square yard of which escaped for one clear moment from servitude to the thousand thousand tramping feet, following at a slower pace the drift of the traffic in the hundred-foot driving way.

No electric welcome blazed from the front of the city hall, with its coal-darkened brickwork and broad steps. No welcome, nor any sound but a mighty hammer-stroke from the tall clock, telling Daisy that Time was moving as well as she. No welcome—but Daisy Nixon felt that there could not help be a quickening of the city's pulse at the notability of this day, with its every moment so rare and thrilling to her.

The pulse of the motor throbbed as, coursing in the pack of its kind, it nosed from side to side or held a true-running swift pace astride a tram-rail. The chauffeur, with an air of profound abstraction made comical by his tilted cap and sportive half-presented profile, gave "her" spark or "juice" as the occasion demanded, with a casual motion of his gloved thumb. At a corner where two broad streets met, the taxi-cab turned aside. Proceeding a little way down the second main artery of traffic, it rounded a corner under a brass-grilled jeweler's window and entered a labyrinth of side-streets in which Daisy soon lost her sense of direction so completely that the sun, after what seemed like an excursion into the little-visited due-north sector of the horizon, appeared to move around to the