in the Pennsylvania Station. She was as different in every
other way as possible. Her life, her environment, her ambitions, had
been completely alien to anything Mrs. Nuddle had known. She had been
educated and evolved by entirely different joys and sorrows, fears and
successes.

Mrs. Nuddle had been afraid that her husband would beat her again, or
kill one of the children in his rage, or get himself sent to prison or
to the chair; Mrs. Nuddle had been afraid that the children would be
run over in the street, would pull a boilerful of boiling water over
onto them, or steal, or go wrong in any of the myriad ways that
children have of going wrong. Mrs. Nuddle's ecstasies were a job well
done, a word of praise from a customer, a chance to sit down, an
interval without pain or worry when her children were asleep, or when
her husband was working and treating her as well as one treats an old
horse.

Of such was the kingdom of Mrs. Nuddle.

Marie Louise had dwelt in a world no more and no less harrowing, but
infinitely unlike. The two sisters were no longer related to each
other by any ties except blood kinship. Mrs. Nuddle was a good woman
gone wrong, Marie Louise a goodish woman gone variously; Mrs. Nuddle a
poor advertisement of a life spent in honest toil, early rising, early
bedding, churchgoing, and rigid economy; Marie Louise a most
attractive evidence of how much depends on a careful carriage, a
cultivated taste in clothes, and an elegant acquaintance.

At last, after years of groping toward each other, the sisters were to
be brought together. But there was to be an intervention. Even while
Marie Louise sat relaxed in a fatigue that she would have called
contentment trouble was stealing toward her.

The spider who came and sat beside this Miss Muffet was Nicky Easton.
He frightened her, but he would not let her run away.

As he dropped to her side she rose with a gasp, but he pressed her
back with a hasty grip on her arm and a mandatory prayer:

"Wait once, pleass."

The men who had shadowed Marie Louise had months before given her up
as hopelessly correct. But guardian angels were still provided for
Nicky Easton; and one of them, seeing this meeting, took Marie Louise
back into the select coterie of the suspects.

There's no cure for your bodily aches and pains like terror. It lifts
the paralytic from his bed, makes the lame scurry, and gives the blind
eyes enough for running. Marie Louise's fatigue fell fr