Had the stranger been saying anything of import Caleb would have missed no syllable. But, through long years of experience with the dreary windiness and empty pothouse eloquence of politicians, the Railroader had learned by instinct, and without waiting to catch so much as the first word, whether anything worth hearing was being said, or if the case were, as he was wont to express it, “an attack of rush-of-words-to-the-mouth.” He had already placed his present caller’s oration in the latter category. But her pause brought him back to himself. “Well?” he demanded. “So I am here to implore you to be just, to be generous,” resumed the girl, slightly raising the pitch of the scene as she approached a climax. “I throw myself on your mercy. I, Enid Conover——” “Enid Conover!” snorted the Railroader. “Why——” “Yes. Enid Conover! How I have learned to love that name!” “Have, hey? Then take my advice, young woman, and stifle that same wild adoration for my poetic cognomen, for you aren’t going to have the renting of it any longer’n I can help.” “Not——?” “Oh, you’ll get over it easy! Just as you got over your love for that high-sounding title, Enid Montmorency. And just as, before that, when you left your mother’s Germantown boarding-house, you got over any passion you may have had for your original name, Emma Higgs. You see I know some little about you. I took the trouble to have you looked up. You and your family. You told Gerald your family’s old. From all I hear, I guess the main difference between you and that same family is that one’s older’n you make out and the other’s younger. Take your choice as to which is which. And now——” “You insult me!” declaimed the girl, her eyes flashing, her figure drawn to the full height of a really excellent pose, her pompadour nestling protectingly above the arched brow.