ith red pompons on the toes. The creature was stretching
herself with the grace of a big cat that has just been roused from a nap
on the hearth-rug.

If his first picture of her had been brief, his second one was
practically a snap-shot, because at sight of him, she flashed to her
feet.

So, for a moment, they confronted each other about equally aghast,
flushed up to the hair, and simultaneously and incoherently, begging
each other's pardon--neither could have said for what, the goddess out
of the machine being Inga, the maid-of-all-work. But suddenly, at a
twinkle she caught in his eye, her own big eyes narrowed and her big
mouth widened into a smile, which broke presently into her deep-throated
laugh, whereupon he laughed too, and they shook hands, and she asked him
to sit down.

[Illustration: At sight of him she flashed to her feet.]

CHAPTER VI

THE BIG HORSE

"It's too ridiculous," she said. "Since last night, when I got to
thinking how I must have looked, wrestling with that conductor, I've
been telling myself that if I ever saw you again, I'd try to act like a
lady. But it's no use, is it?"

He said that he, too, had hoped to make a better impression the second
time than the first. That was what he brought the books back for. He had
hoped to convince her that a man capable of consigning a half-drowned
girl to a ten-mile ride on the elevated, instead of walking her over to
his sister's, having her dried out properly, and sent home in a motor,
wasn't permanently and chronically as blithering an idiot as he may have
seemed. It was a great load off of his mind to find her alive at all.

She gave him a humorously exaggerated account of the prophylactic
measures her mother had submitted her to the night before, and she
concluded:

"I'm awfully sorry mother's not at home--mother and my sister Portia.
They'd both like to thank you for--looking after me last night. Because
really, you did, you know."

"There never was anything less altruistic in the world," he assured her.
"I dropped off of that car solely in pursuit of a selfish aim. And I
didn't come out here to-day to be thanked, either. I mean, of course,
I'd enjoy meeting your mother and sister very much, but what I came for
was to get acquainted with you."

He saw her glance wander a little dubiously to the door. "That is," he
concluded, "if you haven't something else to do."

She flushed and smiled. "No, it wasn't that," she said, "I was tr