ning a girl attired in a neat but inexpensive costume
entered Central Park by the One Hundred and Second Street gate, and
walked swiftly by a winding path to the exit on the west side at One
Hundredth Street.

She moved with the easy swing of one to whom walking was a pleasure.
Without hurry or apparent effort her even, rapid strides brought her
along at a pace of fully four miles an hour. And an hour was exactly the
time Winifred Bartlett needed if she would carry out her daily program,
which, when conditions permitted, involved a four-mile detour by way of
Riverside Drive and Seventy-second Street to the Ninth Avenue "L." This
morning she had actually ten minutes in hand, and promised herself an
added treat in making little pauses at her favorite view-points on the
Hudson.

To gain this hour's freedom Winifred had to practise some harmless
duplicity, as shall be seen. She was obliged to rise long before the
rest of her fellow-workers in the bookbinding factory of Messrs. Brown,
Son & Brown, an establishment located in the least inviting part of
Greenwich Village.

But she went early to bed, and the beams of the morning sun drew her
forth as a linnet from its nest. Unless the weather was absolutely
prohibitive she took the walk every day, for she revelled in the
ever-changing tints of the trees, the music of the songbirds, and the
gambols of the squirrels in the park, while the broad highway of the
river, leading to and from she hardly knew what enchanted lands, brought
vague dreams of some delightful future where daily toil would not claim
her and she might be as those other girls of the outer world to whom
existence seemed such a joyous thing.

Winifred was not discontented with her lot--the ichor of youth and good
health flowed too strongly in her veins. But at times she was bewildered
by a sense of aloofness from the rest of humanity.

Above all did she suffer from the girls she met in the warehouse.
Some were coarse, nearly every one was frivolous. Their talk, their
thinly-veiled allusions to a night life in which she bore no part,
puzzled and disturbed her. True, the wild revels of which they boasted
did not sound either marvelous or attractive when analyzed. A couple of
hours at the movies, a frolic in a dance hall, a quarrel about some
youthful gallant, violent fluctuations from arm-laced friendship to
sparkling-eyed hatred and back again to tears and kisses--these joys
and cankers formed the limited gamu