to get there, somehow."

She was silent a few moments and looked as if she was thinking something
over. Her silence and this look on her face actually caused to dawn in
the breast of Selden a gleam of daring hope. He looked round at her with
a faint rising of colour.

"Say, Miss Vanderpoel--say----" he began, and then broke off.

"Yes?" said Betty, still thinking.

"C-COULD you use one--anywhere?" he said. "I don't want to rush things
too much, but--COULD you?"

"Is it easy to learn to use it?"

"Easy!" his head lifted from his pillow. "It's as easy as falling off
a log. A baby in a perambulator could learn to tick off orders for its
bottle. And--on the square--there isn't its equal on the market, Miss
Vanderpoel--there isn't." He fumbled beneath his pillow and actually
brought forth his catalogue.

"I asked the nurse to put it there. I wanted to study it now and then
and think up arguments. See--adjustable to hold with perfect ease an
envelope, an index card, or a strip of paper no wider than a postage
stamp. Unsurpassed paper feed, practical ribbon mechanism--perfect and
permanent alignment."

As Mount Dunstan had taken the book, Betty Vanderpoel took it. Never had
G. Selden beheld such smiling in eyes about to bend upon his catalogue.

"You will raise your temperature," she said, "if you excite yourself.
You mustn't do that. I believe there are two or three people on the
estate who might be taught to use a typewriter. I will buy three.
Yes--we will say three."

She would buy three. He soared to heights. He did not know how to thank
her, though he did his best. Dizzying visions of what he would have to
tell "the boys" when he returned to New York flashed across his mind.
The daughter of Reuben S. Vanderpoel had bought three Delkoffs, and he
was the junior assistant who had sold them to her.

"You don't know what it means to me, Miss Vanderpoel," he said, "but if
you were a junior salesman you'd know. It's not only the sale--though
that's a rake-off of fifteen dollars to me--but it's because it's YOU
that's bought them. Gee!" gazing at her with a frank awe whose obvious
sincerity held a queer touch of pathos. "What it must be to be YOU--just
YOU!"

She did not laugh. She felt as if a hand had lightly touched her on
her naked heart. She had thought of it so often--had been bewildered
restlessly by it as a mere child--this difference in human lot--this
chance. Was it chance which had placed her entity in t