silken, cool feeling against his palm.

"Kind, Miss Arundel? Pshaw! My middle name's 'Kind' and that's the truth.
Why, how does the song go--''T is love, 't is love that makes the world
go round'--love's just another word for kindness, ain't it? And it's not
such a bad old world either, eh?"

Without knowing it, with the sort of good luck that often attends the
enterprises of such men, Hudson had used a spell. He had quoted, almost
literally, her father's last words and she felt that it was a message
from the other side of death.

She twisted about in her chair, took his hand from her shoulder, and drew
it, stiff and sallow, to her young lips.

"Oh," she sobbed, "you're kind! It _is_ a good world if there are such
men as you!"

When Sylvester Hudson went down the stairs a minute or two after Sheila's
impetuous outbreak, his sallow face was deeply flushed. He stopped to
tell the Irishwoman who rented the garret floor to the Arundels, that
Sheila's future was in his care. During this colloquy, pure business on
his side and mixed business and sentiment on Mrs. Halligan's, Sylvester
did not once look the landlady in the eye. His own eyes skipped hers, now
across, now under, now over. There are some philanthropists who are
overcome with such bashfulness in the face of their own good deeds. But,
sitting back alone in his taxicab on his way to the station to buy
Sheila's ticket to Millings, Sylvester turned his emerald rapidly about
on his finger and whistled to himself. And cryptically he expressed his
glow of gratified fatherliness.

"As smooth as silk," said Sylvester aloud.

CHAPTER III

THE FINEST CITY IN THE WORLD

So Sheila Arundel left the garret where the stars pressed close, and
went with Sylvester Hudson out into the world. It was, that morning, a
world of sawing wind, of flying papers and dust-dervishes, a world, to
meet which people bent their shrinking faces and drew their bodies
together as against the lashing of a whip. Sheila thought she had never
seen New York so drab and soulless; it hurt her to leave it under so
desolate an aspect.

"Cheery little old town, isn't it?" said Sylvester. "Gee! Millings is
God's country all right."

On the journey he put Sheila into a compartment, supplied her with
magazines and left her for the most part to herself--for which isolation
she was grateful. With her compartment door ajar, she could see him in
his section, when he was not in the smoking-car, or