d to use the public telephone in a hotel farther
down the street. Her decision to go to her dad had been born with the
words on her lips. But it was a lusty, full-voiced young decision, and
it was growing at an amazing rate.

Of course she would go to her dad in Idaho! She was astonished that
the idea had never before crystallised into action. Why should she
feed her imagination upon a mimic West, when the great, glorious real
West was there? What if her dad had not written a word for more than a
year? He must be alive; they would surely have heard of his death, for
she and Royal were his sole heirs, and his partner would have their
address.

She walked fast and arrived at the telephone booth so breathless that
she was compelled to wait a few minutes before she could call her
number. She inquired about trains and rates to Echo, Idaho!

Echo, Idaho! While she waited for the information clerk to look it up
the very words conjured visions of wide horizons and clean winds and
high adventure. If she pictured Echo, Idaho, as being a replica of the
"set" used in the movie serial, can you wonder? If she saw herself,
the beloved queen of her father's cowboys, dashing into Echo, Idaho, on
a crimply-maned broncho that pirouetted gaily before the post-office
while handsome young men in chaps and spurs and "big four" Stetsons
watched her yearningly, she was merely living mentally the only West
that she knew.

From that beatific vision Lorraine 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 favourite 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 III

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 t