middle of its mad career toward his lips, "Miss Minorkey, we _should_
like to hear from you on this subject." In truth, the fat gentleman was
very weary of Mr. Minorkey's pitiful succession of diagnoses of the awful
symptoms and fatal complications of which he had been cured by very
allopathic doses of animal food. So he appealed to Miss Minorkey for
relief at a moment when her father had checked and choked his utterance
with coffee.

Miss Minorkey was quite a different affair from her father. She was
thoroughly but not obtrusively healthy. She had a high, white forehead, a
fresh complexion, and a mouth which, if it was deficient in sweetness and
warmth of expression, was also free from all bitterness and
aggressiveness. Miss Minorkey was an eminently well-educated young lady
as education goes. She was more--she was a young lady of reading and of
ideas. She did not exactly defend Charlton's theory in her reply, but she
presented both sides of the controversy, and quoted some scientific
authorities in such a way as to make it apparent that there _were_ two
sides. This unexpected and rather judicial assistance called forth from
Charlton a warm acknowledgment, his pale face flushed with modest
pleasure, and as he noted the intellectuality of Miss Minorkey's forehead
he inwardly comforted himself that the only person of ideas in the whole
company was not wholly against him.

Albert Charlton was far from being a "ladies' man;" indeed, nothing was
more despicable in his eyes than men who frittered away life in ladies'
company. But this did not at all prevent him from being very human
himself in his regard for ladies. All the more that he had lived out of
society all his life, did his heart flutter when he took his seat in the
stage after dinner. For Miss Minorkey's father and the fat gentleman felt
that they must have the back seat; there were two other gentlemen on the
middle seat; and Albert Charlton, all unused to the presence of ladies,
must needs sit on the front seat, alongside the gray traveling-dress of
the intellectual Miss Minorkey, who, for her part, was not in the least
bit nervous. Young Charlton might have liked her better if she had been.

But if she was not shy, neither was she obtrusive. When Mr. Charlton had
grown weary of hearing Mr. Minorkey pity himself, and of hearing the fat
gentleman boast of the excellence of the Minnesota climate, the dryness
of the air, and the wonderful excess of its oxygen, and t