rather she could see
his lean legs, his long, dark hands, and the top of his sleek head. The
rest was an outspread newspaper. Occasionally he would come into the
compartment to read aloud some bit of information which he thought might
interest her. Once it was the prowess of a record-breaking hen; again it
was a joke about a mother-in-law; another time it was the Hilliard murder
case, a scandal of New York high-life, the psychology of which intrigued
Sylvester.

"Isn't it queer, though, Miss Arundel, that such things happen in the
slums and they happen in the smart set, but they don't happen near so
often with just plain folks like you and me! Isn't this, now, a real
Tenderloin Tale--South American wife and American husband and all their
love affairs, and then one day her up and shooting him! Money," quoth
Sylvester, "sure makes love popular. Now for that little ro-mance, poor
folks would hardly stop a day's work, but just because the Hilliards here
have po-sition and spon-dulix, why, they'll run a couple of columns about
'em for a week. What's your opinion on the subject, Miss Arundel?"

He was continually asking this, and poor Sheila, strange, bewildered,
oppressed by his intrusion into her uprooted life, would grope wildly
through her odds and ends of thought and find that on most of the
subjects that interested him, she had no opinions at all.

"You must think I'm dreadfully stupid, Mr. Hudson," she faltered once
after a particularly deplorable failure.

"Oh, you're a kid, Miss Sheila, that's all your trouble. And I reckon
you're half asleep, eh? Kind of brought up on pictures and country walks,
in--what's the name of the foreign part?--Normandy? No friends of your
own age? No beaux?"

Sheila shook her head, smiling. Her flexible smile was as charming as a
child's. It dawned on the gravity of her face with an effect of spring
moonlight. In it there was some of the mischief of fairyland.

"What _you_ need is--Millings," prescribed Sylvester. "Girlie and Babe
will wake you up. Yes, and the boys. You'll make a hit in Millings." He
contemplated her for an instant with his head on one side. "We ain't got
anything like you in Millings."

Sheila, looking out at the wide Nebraskan prairies that slipped
endlessly past her window hour by hour that day, felt that she would not
make a hit at Millings. She was afraid of Millings. Her terror of Babe
and Girlie was profound. She had lived and grown up, as it were, under
h