laughing.

"Well, it _was_ a lark; but the worst is coming. I've got to go home
all alone. I wish you'd come and tell the tale for _me_, Miss
Sylvie. I shouldn't be half so afraid!"

CHAPTER III.

TWO TRIPS IN THE TRAIN.

The seven o'clock morning train was starting from Dorbury Upper
Village.

Early business men, mechanics, clerks, shop-girls, sewing-girls,
office-boys,--these made up the list of passengers. Except, perhaps,
some travellers now and then, bound for a first express from Boston,
or an excursion party to take a harbor steamer for a day's trip to
Nantasket or Nahant.

Did you ever contrast one of these trains--when perhaps you were
such traveller or excursionist--with the after, leisurely,
comfortable one at ten or eleven; when gentlemen who only need to be
in the city through banking hours, and ladies bent on calls or
elegant shopping, come chatting and rustling to their seats, and
hold a little drawing-room exchange in the twenty-five minutes'
trip?

If you have,--and if you have a little sympathetic imagination that
fills out hints,--you have had a glimpse of some of these "other
girls" and the thing that daily living is to them, with which my
story means to concern itself.

Have you noticed the hats, with the rose or the feather behind or at
top, scrupulously according to the same dictate of style that rules
alike for seven and ten o'clock, but which has often to be worn
through wet and dry till the rose has been washed by too many a
shower, and the feather blown by too many a dusty wind, to stand for
anything but a sign that she knows what should be where, if she
only had it to put there? Have you seen the cheap alpacas, in two
shades, sure to fade in different ways and out of kindred with each
other, painfully looped in creasing folds, very much sat upon, but
which would not by any means resign themselves to simple smoothed
straightness, while silks were hitched and crisp Hernanis puffed?

Yet the alpacas, and all their innumerable cousinhood, have also
their first mornings of fresh gloss, when the newness of the counter
is still upon them; there is a youth for all things; a first time, a
charm that seems as if it might last, though we know it neither will
nor was meant to; if it would, or were, the counters might be taken
down. And people who wear gowns that are creased and faded, have
each, one at a time, their days of glory, when they begin again. The
farther apart they come,