the conclusion that he did it on Cornelia's account. If he was
to take her to the boarding-house himself, they might think he was
engaged to _her_."

"Well!" said Mrs. Saunders.

"You may be sure it's because he's good and thoughtful about it, and
wants her not to have any embarrassment."

"Oh, I guess he's all right," said Mrs. Saunders. "But who'd ever have
thought of having to take such precautions? I shouldn't think life was
worth having on such terms, if _I_ was a girl."

She told Cornelia about this strange social ceremony of chaperonage,
which now for the first time practically concerned them.

X.

The night began to fall an hour before Cornelia's train reached New
York, and it drew into the station, through the whirl and dance of
parti-colored lights everywhere.

The black porter of the sleeping-ear caught up her bag and carried it
out for her, as if he were going to carry it indefinitely; and outside
she stood letting him hold it, while she looked about her, scared and
bewildered, and the passengers hurrying by, pushed and bumped against
her. When she collected her wits sufficiently to take it from him, she
pressed on with the rest up toward the front of the station where the
crowd frayed out in different directions. At the open doorway giving on
the street she stopped, and stood holding her bag, and gazed fearfully
out on a line of wild men on the curbstone; they all seemed to be
stretching their hands out to her, and they rattled and clamored: "Keb?
A keb, a keb, a keb? Want a keb? Keb here! Keb? A keb, a keb, a keb!"
They were kept back by a policeman who prevented them from falling upon
the passengers, and restored them to order when they yielded by the
half-dozen to the fancy that some one had ordered a cab, and started
off in the direction of their vehicles, and then rushed back so as not
to lose other chances. The sight of Cornelia standing bag in hand
there, seemed to drive them to a frenzy of hope; several newsboys,
eager to share their prosperity, rushed up and offered her the evening
papers.

Cornelia strained forward from the doorway and tried to make out, in
the kaleidoscopic pattern of lights, which was the Fourth Avenue car;
the street was full of cars and carts and carriages, all going every
which way, with a din of bells, and wheels and hoofs that was as if
crushed to one clangerous mass by the superior uproar of the railroad
trains coming and going on a sort of street-roof ov