d say," called Brotherton
to Fenn, "bring her up to the Palace Hotel for supper, and we'll fill
her full of rich food, so's she can sing--well, say!"

That evening going home Grant met Margaret and Fenn at a turn of the
road, and before they noticed him, he saw a familiar look in her eyes as
she gazed at the man, saw how closely they were sitting in the buggy,
saw a score of little things that sent the blood to his face and he
strode on past them without speaking. That night he slipped into the
room where the baby lay playing with his toes, and there, standing over
the little fellow, the youth's eyes filled with tears and for the first
time he felt the horror of the baby lifting from him. He did not touch
the child, but tiptoed from the room ashamed to be seen.

To Margaret Mueller, the baby's mother, that night opened a new world. To
begin with, it marked her entrance through the portals of the Palace
Hotel as a guest. She had sometimes flitted into the office with its
loose, tiled floors and shabby, onyx splendor to speak to Miss Mauling
of the news stand; then she came as a fugitive and saw things only
furtively. But this night Margaret walked in through the "Ladies
Entrance," sat calmly in the parlor, while Mr. Fenn wrote her name upon
the register, and after some delirious moments of grand conversation
with Mr. Fenn in the gilded hall of pleasure with its chenille draperies
and its apoplectic furniture all puffed to the bursting point, she had
walked with Mr. Fenn through the imposing halls of the wonderful
edifice, like a rescued princess in a fairy tale, to the dining room,
there to meet Mr. Brotherton, and the eldest Miss Morton, who recently
had been playing the cabinet organ at funerals to guide Mr. Brotherton's
choir. Now the eldest Miss Morton was not antique, being only a scant
fifteen in short dresses and pig tails. But at the urgent request of Mr.
Brotherton, and "to fill out the table, and to take the wrinkles out of
her apron by a square meal at the Palace," as Mr. Brotherton explained
to the Captain, she had been primped and curled and scared by her
sisters and her father, and sent along with Mr. Brotherton--possibly in
his great ulster pocket, and she sat breathing irregularly and looking
steadily into her lap in great awe and trepidation.

Margaret Mueller, in the dining-room whose fame had spread to the
outposts of Spring township and to the fastnesses of Prospect, behaved
with scarcely less const