er a table--"Linene Skirts, 75 cts. and $1.00."

Here was a ray of hope. She turned eagerly to examine them. Piles of
sombre skirts, blue and black and tan. They were stout and coarse and
scant, and not of the latest cut, but what mattered it? She decided on a
seventy-five cent black one. It seemed pitiful to have to economize in a
matter of twenty-five cents, when she had been used to counting her money
by dollars, yet there was a feeling of exultation at having gotten for
that price any skirt at all that would do. A dim memory of what she had
read about ten-cent lodging-houses, where human beings were herded like
cattle, hovered over her.

Growing wise with experience, she discovered that she could get a black
sateen shirt-waist for fifty cents. Rubbers and a cotton umbrella took
another dollar and a half. She must save at least a dollar to send back
the suit-case by express.

A bargain-table of odds and ends of woollen jackets, golf vests, and old
fashioned blouse sweaters, selling off at a dollar apiece, solved the
problem of a wrap. She selected a dark blouse, of an ugly, purply blue,
but thick and warm. Then with her precious packages she asked a
pleasant-faced saleswoman if there were any place near where she could
slip on a walking skirt she had just bought to save her other skirt from
the muddy streets. She was ushered into a little fitting-room near by. It
was only about four feet square, with one chair and a tiny table, but it
looked like a palace to the girl in her need, and as she fastened the door
and looked at the bare painted walls that reached but a foot or so above
her head and had no ceiling, she wished with all her heart that such a
refuge as this might be her own somewhere in the great, wide, fearful
world.

Rapidly she slipped off her fine, silk-lined cloth garments, and put on
the stiff sateen waist and the coarse black skirt. Then she surveyed
herself, and was not ill pleased. There was a striking lack of collar and
belt. She sought out a black necktie and pinned it about her waist, and
then, with a protesting frown, she deliberately tore a strip from the edge
of one of the fine hem-stitched handkerchiefs, and folded it in about her
neck in a turn-over collar. The result was quite startling and unfamiliar.
The gown, the hair, the hat, and the neat collar gave her the look of a
young nurse-girl or upper servant. On the whole, the disguise could not
have been better. She added the blue woollen b