is
much better bred, and he certainly knows much more than Ina's
husband, even if he does only keep a grocery store; but then army
officers are not supposed to know much except how to fight."

The heavy jar of a passing freight train made her look at the
post-office clock, and with her usual promptness, although it was
fully seven minutes before the train was due, even if it were on
time, and she was only about one minute's walk from the station, she
reflected that she must start at once if she were to meet her father.
So she stowed away her letters in her little bag, and fairly ran
across the icy slope between the office and the station. She saw, as
she hurried along, a child tumble down, and watched him jump up and
run off to make sure he was not hurt. When she reached the station
she did not go in the waiting-room, which seemed close and stuffy,
but remained out on the platform. The sun had set, but the western
sky, which was visible from that point, was a clear expanse of rose
and violet. Charlotte stood looking at it, and for a minute she was
able to find that standing-point outside her own little life and
affairs which exists for the soul. She did not think any more of the
money troubles, of her bowing so stiffly to Mr. Anderson. She forgot
not only her petty worries, but her petty triumphs and pleasures. She
forgot even the exceeding becomingness of a new way in which she had
dressed her hair. She forgot her coat, which she had herself trimmed
with fur taken from an old one of her mother's, and in which her
heart delighted. She forgot her supreme dinner warming on the
range-shelf at home. She forgot the joy she would soon have in seeing
her father alight from the train. The little, young, untrained
creature saw and knew for the moment only the eternal that which was
and is and shall be, and which the sunset symbolized. Her young face
had a rapt expression looking at it.

"Dandy sunset, ain't it?" said a voice at her ear. She looked and saw
Bessy Van Dorn, her large, blooming face, rosy with the cold, smiling
at her from under a mass of tossing black plumes on a picture-hat.
The girl was really superb in a long, fur-lined coat. She had driven
in a sleigh to the station, and she expected Frank Eastman on the
train, and was, with the most innocent and ignorant boldness in the
world, planning to drive him home, although she was not engaged to
him and he was not expecting her. Her face, turning from the
wonderful a