st of all this home happiness. She passed a
little cottage where a young man and woman were tying up a rose vine,
beaten down by recent rains. Madame had told her they had been married
just the week before. They looked very happy, laughing and whispering
like a couple of nest-building robins, as they worked together to make
their little home more beautiful. She had to hurry away from the
pretty scene. Some one had promised her once that there should be a
rose vine over their porch in the new home he had been planning for her.

She turned a corner and was alarmed by a great churning and puffing
noise ahead, as though the _Inverness_ had left her native element and
come sailing up Main Street. But it was only Captain Willoughby in his
new automobile. It was the first, and as yet the only machine in
Algonquin, and its unhappy owner would have sold it to the lowest
bidder could he have found any one foolish enough to bid at all. For
so far, the captain had had no opportunity to learn to run it. His
first excursions abroad had been attended with such disaster, such mad
careering of horses, and plunging into ditches, such dismaying
paralysis of the engine right in the middle of a neighbour's gateway,
such inexplicable excursions onto the sidewalk and through plate glass
windows, such harrowing overturning of baby-carriages, that Mrs.
Captain Willoughby took an attack of nerves every time he went abroad,
and the town fathers finally requested that the captain take out his
Juggernaut car only at such hours as the streets were clear. So on
quiet evenings such as this one, when there were not likely to be any
horses abroad, Mrs. Willoughby telephoned all her friends and told them
to take in the children for the captain was coming. And so, heralded,
like the Lady Godiva, the trembling motorist went forth, while the
streets immediately became as empty as those of Coventry, with rows of
peeping Toms, safe inside their fences, jeering at the unhappy man's
uneven progress. He whizzed past Helen at a terrible speed, grazing
the side-walk and giving her almost as great a fright as he got
himself, and went whirring up the hill.

She did not want to join the crowds in the park so she followed the
familiar street past the school, and out along the Pine Road toward the
lake shore. But when she found her way was leading her through Willow
Lane, where all the dirty and poor people of Algonquin lived, she
turned off into a path t