g but kindness. She seized it gratefully: and there would be no
embarrassment of a Mrs. Cherry connected with it. This new Man knew
nothing of any Dream that had been shattered. And if he lived in
Lewisburg, he most probably knew her father. Her experience with
municipalities was that everybody in a town knew everybody else and all
their affairs into the bargain. And she was far past remembering
Certain Instructions in such a Crisis.

She turned to Ross, a tear-stained face on which her gratitude at his
offer struggled with her woes and the Horror of the Situation.

"My ... my fa-ther...." she began brokenly, and then gulped, and
stopped.

It sounded very much like a greeting of the man before her, but it was
only that her unruly voice refused entirely to respond to her efforts
to use it.

Ross's look searched her quickly, up and down. She was as unlike the
child he had expected to find as he could have found in a day's long
journey; but there could hardly be two sets of fathers and daughters in
so similar a predicament in the same station.

"I think you've found him, right here," he said lightly, to down a
curious little feeling that suddenly surged through his heart, "if
you're Miss Arethusa Worthington, that is. I'm...."

Arethusa waited not for him to finish with a definite announcement of
his identity; she needed no further words to convince her of just who
he was. And although this was far, far from being what she had always
visioned the wonder of their Meeting, she put her whole soul into her
side of it.

She flung both arms tight around his neck as if she never intended to
let him go; and sobbed violently, salty tears that soaked clear through
the expensive tweed of his new suit. But these were not the tears of
unhappiness which he had noticed and which had caused him to stop and
make his offer of help; they were tears of joy for the sheer relief
that his bodily presence gave to his volatile daughter. With the
impulsive suddenness of her embrace her hat had flown clear off, but
Arethusa recked not, in such a moment, of hats with precious and
beautiful turkey feathers, and she lost, of necessity, her careful grip
of her purse and satchel.

Ross, for a moment or two, was entirely bereft of coherent thought by
the suddenness of her movement. He was nearly strangled by the clinging
arms, and a trifle embarrassed besides; for it was not every day that a
strange young lady precipitated herself into his arms