rich. She could treat the troubled, pale little mother
and the two children from the next section to lemonades every
afternoon, and when they reached Chicago, hot and sunshiny at last, she
and Teddy spent the day loitering through a big department store. Here
Teddy was given a Boy Scout suit, and Martie bought herself a cake of
perfumed soap whose odour, whenever she caught it in after times,
brought back the enchanting emotion of these first days of independence.

Tired, dirty, they were sitting together late in the afternoon of the
fifth day, when she felt a sudden tug at her heart. Outside the car
window, slipping steadily by, were smoke-stained brick factories, and
little canals and backwaters soiled with oil and soot, and heaps of
slag and scrap iron and clinkers. Then villages swept by--flat, orderly
villages with fences enclosing summer gardens. Then factories
again--villages--factories--no more of the flat, bare fields: the
fields were all of the West.

But suddenly above this monotonous scene Martie noticed a dull glow
that grew rosier and steadier as the early evening deepened. Up against
the first early stars the lights of New York climbed in a wide bar of
pink and gold, flung a quivering bar of red.

She was back again! Back in the great city. She belonged once more to
the seething crowds in the Ghetto, to the cool arcades between the
great office buildings, to Broadway with its pushing crowds of
shoppers, to the Bronx teeming with tiny shops and swung with the signs
of a thousand apartments to let. The hotels, with their uniformed
starters, the middle Forties, with their theatrical boarding-houses,
the tiny experimental art shops and tea shops and gift shops that
continually appear and disappear among the basements of old brown-stone
houses--she was back among them all!

Tears of joy and excitement came to her eyes. She pressed her face
eagerly beside the child's face at the window.

"Look down, Ted, that's the East Side, dear, with all the children
playing; do you remember? And see all the darling awnings flapping!"

"I shouldn't wonder if we should have an electric storm!" said Teddy,
finding the old phrase easily, his warm little cheek against hers.

"We're back in New York, Teddy! We're home again!" She was gathering
her things together. A thought smote her, and she paused with suddenly
colouring cheeks. This might so easily have been her wedding-trip; she
and Clifford might have been together n