here for life if you don't make him mad. For life. I'll go down and make the tea. You come down pretty soon." She disappeared, leaving Geraldine standing in the middle of the room. She looked about her at the cheap, meager furniture, the small mirror that distorted her face, the bare outlook from the window. "For life!" she repeated to herself. "For life!" CHAPTER III The Prince The Prince Miss Upton's accounts were still in a muddle when she reached Keefe. Try as she might her unruly thoughts would wander back to the golden hair and dark, wistful eyes of that forlorn girl. "I was such a fool to lose her!" she kept saying to herself. "Such a fool." Arrived at her station she left the car, encumbered by her bulging bag and the umbrella which had performed a nobler deed to-day than keeping off the rain. "I don't know, though," soliloquized Miss Mehitable. "If I hadn't had my umbrella I couldn't have stopped him and he'd have sat with her and I shouldn't be havin' a span-tod now." From the car in front of her she saw descend a young man with a bag. He was long-legged, lean and broad-shouldered, and Miss Upton, who had known him all his life, estimated him temperately as a mixture of Adonis, Apollo, and Hercules. He caught sight of his friend now and a merry look came into his eyes. Miss Mehitable's mental perturbation and physical weariness had given her plump face a troubled cast, accented by the fact that her hat was slightly askew. The young man hurried forward and was in time to ease his portly friend down the last step of her car. "Howdy, Miss Mehit?" he said. "You look as if the great city hadn't treated you well." "Ben Barry, was you on this train?" she asked dismally. "I was. My word, you're careful of your complexion! An umbrella with such a sky as this!" "You don't know what that umbrella has meant to me to-day," returned Miss Upton with no abatement of the portentous in her tone. "Let me have my bag, Ben. The top don't shut very good and you might drop something out."
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