Persis decided on a
visit to the city, with a view to making this investment.

"I'm a little seedy with being shut in so much this winter, and a trip
will do me good whether I buy an automobile or not. Mary's mother will
come and stay with her and help out with the children. And if Joel
wants to go along, he can." But apparently the protective impulse
which had moved Joel to offer his company on the occasion of her
previous visit had waned during the winter. He declined the invitation
without thanks.

It was proof enough of Persis' temperamental youthfulness that she
reached the city with as keen a sense of adventure as if she had been a
runaway boy following a circus. She went to the modest hotel she had
patronized the previous fall and was surprised and flattered when the
clerk called her by name.

"Gives a body a home-coming feeling, that does," remarked Persis, as
she wrote the cramped signature which so poorly represented her robust
personality. "I don't see how you can remember everybody, with folks
coming and going all the time."

"There are some people it's easy to remember," replied the clerk
gallantly and at the same time with sincerity. Whatever else time
erased from the tablets of his memory, he would never forget Persis,
and her acquisition of a family. Then he looked at her
interrogatively, for Persis had jumped, blotting the register.

"You'll have to excuse me." Persis reached for the blotter. "I saw a
name I know and it sort of took my breath." There were but two
signatures on the page besides her own, the names of Mrs. Honoria Walsh
and Enid Randolph, both of Warren, New York.

"I'll give you room forty-two," said the clerk, taking a key from the
hook and nodding to a watchful lad in uniform. "Mrs. Walsh and her
niece Miss Randolph are on the same floor. If they are friends of
yours--"

"No, I wouldn't say that," Persis interrupted. "It's just that I've
heard of 'em before." As she left the elevator on the second floor,
two women glided past her, one the portly widow with abundant crepe who
is not easily differentiated, the other a stately girl with blonde hair
and a scornfully tilted chin. Instinct told Persis that the latter was
Enid.

She enjoyed her first day vastly. She drove some two hundred miles in
machines of different makes and listened with keen interest to the
arguments proving conclusively that each was superior to all others.
Night found her tired, a little h