ETHEL CAREW was on a train returning to Sheridan from a trip of several days through Montana and Idaho, when she happened to pick up a twenty-hour-old newspaper which printed, under a Chicago date line, the information that Mrs. Oliver Cullen—the wife of the late son of the late John Cullen of Chicago and herself widely known throughout the East—had returned to her home after having been missing for many months. Her family and friends had supposed her lost on the Gallantic, in September, 1918; but she had survived and, by concealing this fact, had created, by her return, a sensation in Chicago circles.
This was all that the paragraph of telegraphed news matter supplied, and it was quite enough for Ethel to learn at one moment.
"Barney's mother," she exclaimed to herself; and with her amazement of wonder as to what cousin Agnes had been doing and where she had been, there ran a rill of excited feeling for Barney. Did he know, she wondered? Where was he? What was it all about—cousin Agnes alive and concealing herself! It was too much to grasp at once, particularly with this total lack of explanatory details.
She immediately wrote telegrams which she had dispatched from the next stop, one to Barney and the other to Mrs. Wain, asking them to wire her at Sheri-
