w only
abstractly by the way of her arithmetic that such vast sums of money
existed. And now she was expected to spend this fortune in the space of
three days upon herself. She folded up the slip of paper and tucked it
carefully into her purse. When she presented it at one of the shops in
the Square in payment for the cheap trunk she had selected, she started
a local sensation. By the time the check had traveled from the clerk to
the proprietor and thence to the River National Bank, which did not take
long, it was known in that busy neighborhood that Clark's Field had made
good at last! Here was ready money from it as evidence. Adelle Clark was
in fact the heiress that her mother Addie had been in fancy.

The manager of the livery-stable may have had his regrets for the light
manner in which he had treated old Pike's suggestion. He drove the girl
himself into B---- on Friday with her new trunk strapped behind the
closed carriage and touched his high hat when she dismounted before the
flunky-guarded doors of the hotel. Adelle did not notice the hat
business: she gave her old friend and best "roomer" her hand as she said
good-bye, then slowly mounted the stone steps of the hotel. And that was
the last that Church Street saw of the Clarks.

The liveryman, slowly retracing his way across the bridge to Alton,
mused upon the picture that the little girl presented in her blue school
suit, going up the steps of the Eclair Hotel. It was all like a stage
story, he felt, and he thought long about the Clarks, whom he had known
for two generations and about human fate generally. He summed up his
reflections in one enigmatic exclamation,--"That blamed old pasture!"

Adelle was an "heiress." Already she had been whisked away from Church
Street to her new life. And all because of "that blamed old
pasture"--otherwise Clark's Field.

XI

The civilized inhabitants of our twentieth-century world are acquainted
with many more kinds of torture than the ingenious managers of the
Inquisition ever dreamed of in their most lurid nightmares. And of all
these peculiarly modern forms of torture, perhaps the fashionable girls'
school such as Herndon Hall takes first rank. A boys' school of the same
order--conducted under the patronage of some holy saint's name--is often
pretty bad, but it cannot rival the girls' school because women are more
skillful in applying social torture and have a thousand ways of doing it
to a man's or boy's one