ine floated into others more entrancing.
All the hairbreadth escapes of the heroine of the movie serial were
hers, adapted by her native logic to fit within the bounds of
possibility,--though I must admit they bulged here and there and
threatened to overlap and to encroach upon the impossible. Over the
hills where her father's vast herds grazed, sleek and wild and
long-horned and prone to stampede, galloped the Lorraine of Lorraine's
dreams, on horses sure-footed and swift. With her galloped strong men
whose faces limned the features of her favorite Western "lead."

That for all her three years of intermittent intimacy with a
disillusioning world of mimicry, her dreams were pure romance, proved
that Lorraine had still the unclouded innocence of her girlhood
unspoiled.

CHAPTER THREE

REALITY IS WEIGHED AND FOUND WANTING

Still dreaming her dreams, still featuring herself as the star of many
adventures, Lorraine followed the brakeman out of the dusty day coach
and down the car steps to the platform of the place called Echo, Idaho.
I can only guess at what she expected to find there in the person of a
cattle-king father, but whatever it was she did not find it. No father,
of any type whatever, came forward to claim her. In spite of her
"Western" experience she looked about her for a taxi, or at least a
street car. Even in the wilds of Western melodrama one could hear the
clang of street-car gongs warning careless autoists off the track.

After the train had hooted and gone on around an absolutely
uninteresting low hill of yellow barrenness dotted with stunted sage, it
was the silence that first impressed Lorraine disagreeably. Echo, Idaho,
was a very poor imitation of all the Western sets she had ever seen.
True, it had the straggling row of square-fronted, one-story buildings,
with hitch rails, but the signs painted across the fronts were
absolutely common. Any director she had ever obeyed would have sent for
his assistant director and would have used language which a lady must
not listen to. Behind the store and the post-office and the blacksmith
shop, on the brow of the low hill around whose point the train had
disappeared, were houses with bay windows and porches absolutely out of
keeping with the West. So far as Lorraine could see, there was not a log
cabin in the whole place.

The hitch rails were empty, and there was not a cowboy in sight. Before
the post-office a terribly grimy touring car stood wit