of twenty-two now; but the porter, who had been on that "run" for many years, knew her when she was a child—a fair, violet-eyed, light-haired little girl from the west who traveled from Chicago with her uncles and aunts—Mr. and Mrs. John Cullen or Mr. and Mrs. Lucas Cullen—to visit her grandfather at St. Florentin.
She had no mother, it developed; and her father, for some reason, never made the trip from Chicago to Escanaba but always was out home in Wyoming. Yet she seldom had passed a year without a journey north and south along the lake—accompanied always by one of the Cullens and always traveling in luxury, with a drawing-room and a section for every extra member of the party.
This trip, however, was different. For Miss Ethel had appeared entirely unaccompanied upon the platform at Chicago last evening; and she had been carrying her own handbag. The porter, greeting her and seizing the handbag, had made at once for the drawing-room, but only to find, as she followed him, that she had a ticket for lower four.
"Fix you up wid de drawing-room now, Miss Ethel," he whispered to her after the train had started, and the room at the end proved to be unsold.
She thanked him but said that a lower would do very well.
"Not even a section; jes' de lower," the old man ruminated as he moved reluctantly away; and he observed her during the evening with concerned interest. After her visit to the dining car—which was mighty brief for a young lady who looked so well and ought to have a good appetite—she asked for a table; and she took a great sheaf of worrisome looking papers from
