rsonal effort to reinforce the Harlings' slender income.

He was only a stone's throw from home and what led him to turn the
other way, pass into Beaver Street, and go south toward Orient Avenue
he could not have told. Possibly he was still thrilling with newly
awakened altruism and was not yet ready to have his roseate dreams
disturbed. Or he may have been pondering so deeply how to put his
impulses into action that he failed to heed just where he was going. At
any rate before he realized it there he was in the fashionable section
of the village, walking along between rows of bare and stately elms and
great rambling houses glimpsed from behind high brick walls.

He had not been in this part of Baileyville for months. There was
nothing to take him there. What connection had his life with those
fortunate lives that made leisure and luxury things to be taken for
granted? Even now he started at finding himself in a location so
incongruous; or rather at finding so incongruous a person as himself in
an environment so out of harmony with his thought and station.

He whirled about to start homeward and it was just at this instant that
a trim racing car drew up beside him and a man's voice inquired
pleasantly:

"Lost your way, youngster?"

Carl glanced at the speaker.

He was a gray-haired, clean-shaven man, with fresh color and keen blue
eyes. Although muffled to the chin in a raccoon coat that almost met
the fur of his cap there was a splendid vigor about him that breathed
health, energy, and the rewards a temperate life brings. Everything
about him seemed clearness personified--eye, complexion, voice.

"I've not lost my way, thank you, sir," Carl answered. "I just got to
thinking and have wandered farther from home than I meant to."

"Are you going back to town now?"

"Yes, sir."

"Jump in and I'll give you a lift."

Raising the fur robes invitingly the stranger reached to open the door.

Carl was almost too surprised to speak.

"You're very kind, sir," he contrived to stammer. "I should be glad of
a ride. I don't often get one. Besides, I ought to have been at home
long ago."

The honesty of the reply apparently pleased the motorist for, smiling,
he tucked the lad in and asked:

"Where do you live?"

"At Mulberry Court, sir."

"I'm afraid I don't quite know where that is."

"Very likely not. It's a little tenement house off Minton Street. Maybe
you never were there."

"I guess I never was," the man