ircle. She perceived that she was in
that position, familiar to melodrama, of being alone in a great city.
The reflection brought with it a certain discomfort. The bag that
dangled from her wrist contained all the money she had in the world,
the very broken remains of the twenty dollars which Uncle Chris had
sent her at Brookport. She had nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep, and no
immediately obvious means of adding to her capital. It was a situation
which she had not foreseen when she set out to walk to Brookport
station.

She pondered over the mystery of Uncle Chris' disappearance, and found
no solution. The thing was inexplicable. She was as sure of the
address he had given in his letter as she was of anything in the
world. Yet at that address nothing had been heard of him. His name was
not even known. These were deeper waters than Jill was able to fathom.

She walked on aimlessly. Presently she came to Columbus Circle, and,
crossing Broadway at the point where that street breaks out into an
eruption of automobile shops, found herself, suddenly hungry, opposite
a restaurant whose entire front was a sheet of plate glass. On the
other side of this glass, at marble-topped tables, apparently careless
of their total lack of privacy, sat the impecunious, lunching, their
every mouthful a spectacle for the passer-by. It reminded Jill of
looking at fishes in an aquarium. In the centre of the window, gazing
out in a distrait manner over piles of apples and grape-fruit, a
white-robed ministrant at a stove juggled ceaselessly with buckwheat
cakes. He struck the final note in the candidness of the
establishment, a priest whose ritual contained no mysteries.
Spectators with sufficient time on their hands to permit them to stand
and watch were enabled to witness a New York midday meal in every
stage of its career, from its protoplasmic beginnings as a stream of
yellowish-white liquid poured on top of the stove to its ultimate
Nirvana in the interior of the luncher in the form of an appetising
cake. It was a spectacle which no hungry girl could resist. Jill went
in, and, as she made her way among the tables, a voice spoke her name.

"Miss Mariner!"

Jill jumped, and thought for a moment that the thing must have been an
hallucination. It was impossible that anybody in the place should have
called her name. Except for Uncle Chris, wherever he might be, she
knew no one in New York. Then the voice spoke again, competing
valiantly with