--while you are out
there, be sure to let me know," he said.

She promised and waved at him from the platform as he stood motionless,
staring after her. Romance had spent a whole day in Boston! And with Mr.
Alden Wentworth, of all people!

Fortunately for the sanity of the human race, the tension of grief is
variable. Honora, closed in her stateroom, eased herself that night by
writing a long, if somewhat undecipherable, letter to Chiltern; and was
able, the next day, to read the greater portion of a novel. It was only
when she arrived in Chicago, after nightfall, that loneliness again
assailed her. She was within nine hours--so the timetable said--of St.
Louis! Of all her trials, the homesickness which she experienced as she
drove through the deserted streets of the metropolis of the Middle West
was perhaps the worst. A great city on Sunday night! What traveller has
not felt the depressing effect of it? And, so far as the incoming
traveller is concerned, Chicago does not put her best foot forward. The
way from the station to the Auditorium Hotel was hacked and bruised--so
it seemed--by the cruel battle of trade. And she stared, in a kind of
fascination that increased the ache in her heart; at the ugliness and
cruelty of the twentieth century.

To have imagination is unquestionably to possess a great capacity for
suffering, and Honora was paying the penalty for hers. It ran riot now.
The huge buildings towered like formless monsters against the blackness
of the sky under the sickly blue of the electric lights, across the
dirty, foot-scarred pavements, strange black human figures seemed to
wander aimlessly: an elevated train thundered overhead. And presently she
found herself the tenant of two rooms in that vast refuge of the
homeless, the modern hotel, where she sat until the small hours looking
down upon the myriad lights of the shore front, and out beyond them on
the black waters of an inland sea.

.......................

From Newport to Salomon City, in a state not far from the Pacific tier,
is something of a transition in less than a week, though in modern life
we should be surprised at nothing. Limited trains are wonderful enough;
but what shall be said of the modern mind, that travels faster than
light? and much too fast for the pages of a chronicle. Martha Washington
and the good ladies of her acquaintance knew nothing about the upper
waters of the Missouri, and the words "for better, for worse, f