hat do you take me for?
Do you think I'd lure you to Chicago and then leave you?"

"Martin," said Elsie gravely, "a girl must protect herself."

"You'll go, honey?" Druce persisted.

"I can't tell," replied the girl desperately, anxious to promise and yet
afraid.

"You'll go," said Druce positively, "at eight o'clock--"

A cool voice broke in on his sentence. Druce started like a man suddenly
drenched with cold water.

"What's that is going to happen at eight o'clock, Mr. Druce?"

The speaker was Patience Welcome.

CHAPTER VI

A ROMANCE DAWNS--AND A TRAGEDY

Patience Welcome shared all the prejudices of her employer, John Price,
against "city chaps." Her observation of those who had presented
themselves in Millville had not raised her estimate of them. As a class
she found them overdressed and underbred. They came into her small town
obsessed with the notion of their superiority. Patience had been at some
pains in a quiet way to puncture the pretensions of as many as came
within scope of her sarcasm. She was not, like many girls of Millville,
so much overwhelmed by the glamour of Chicago that she believed every
being from that metropolis must be of a superior breed. She had
penetration enough to estimate them at their true value. In her
frankness, she made no effort to conceal her sentiments toward them.

But recently there had come into her acquaintance a product of Chicago
whom she could not fit into Mr. Price's city chap category. This was
Harry Boland.

Young Boland, the son of Chicago's "electrical king," was himself
president of his father's Lake City Electrical Company. He was good
looking, quiet, competent and totally lacking in the bumptiousness that
Patience found so offensive in other Chicago youths. Toward him Patience
had been compelled to modify her usual attitude of open aversion to mere
cold reserve. She did not quite comprehend him and until conviction of
his merits came she was determined to occupy the safe ground of
suspicion.

Patience and Harry Boland had first met on a basis that could scarcely
have been more formal. The young man, early in his business career, had
been his father's collector. Part of his duties had consisted of
collecting the rents of a large number of workmen's cottages which the
elder Boland owned at Millville. The Welcomes occupied one of these
cottages. As Tom Welcome not infrequently was unable to pay