young Lucas and Myra, his wife, and John and his wife all became well known, they never altogether gained the honorable prominence which Oliver's wife won; and this fact was borne in upon Lucas never more aggravatingly than at the time of the torpedoing of the Gallantic in September of the year just past. For Lucas II and Oliver's wife both were aboard; when the first reports of the disaster reached the city with the list of Chicagoans unaccounted for, there had been as much doubt of the safety of Lucas II as of the fate of Oliver's wife; yet every newspaper in the city displayed in tremendous headlines the fear that Mrs. Oliver Cullen was lost, relegating the interest in Lucas to secondary place.
To old Lucas, this had seemed insulting, disgraceful. "Mrs. Oliver Cullen Among the Lost," he reread the black type contemptuously. "Mrs. Oliver Cullen—Cullen," he repeated grudging her his surname "As if people cared what happened to that woman."
But people did care; many, many of them. Ethel had cared for cousin Agnes, though there was no blood bond between them, far more than for any one else whom she saw in Chicago. Indeed, cousin Agnes's personality was so predominant in Ethel's mind that when she thought of Chicago she had always thought first of cousin Agnes, of seeing her again and talking with her, and learning of the absorbing and vital new activities in which cousin Agnes would be engaged. For cousin Agnes was always absorbed in work and somehow, without dropping the tasks which had enlisted her, she continually was taking on new duties.
She had first come to Chicago when she was a girl,—so she always told those who asked her. Previously she had lived in a small town, she said; and no one—
