beside which she had been born and had lived all her life. She looked for the water and watched it at every eastward open space, as the train rushed into Indiana.
Now the lake lay to the north. Ellen gazed up the length of the great fresh sea toward her home, nearly four hundred miles away, where were her mother and sisters and brothers—and the room which, shared with her sister, was hers and the room with the bed upon which Jay had slept.
The lake, all the length of it, represented home and home people; for they sailed upon it, her father's ship traversed it all. The lake had brought her father to her and away from her and back to her again.
The porter, with Ethiopian sensitiveness to feelings, stepped to Ellen: "You'll be havin' your last look at the lake."
Ellen arose and gazed back, long after the water had vanished.
Mr. Armiston was very glad to have her, and he turned over the office to her with results which he signaled by reducing to nearly nothing his hours of attendance at his desk. In contrast to Mr. Rountree, he celebrated with compliments. "Satisfactory" was a weak and wobbling word to describe her, he declared. "Never saw a girl with as good a head."
But Ellen did not expect to accomplish, with her hands and head, her errand in New York.
When first she phoned Lew's office, on a matter of routine business, she imagined the possibility of reaching Lew and being recognized; but upon that occasion and subsequently, another answered and dealt with her. When
