* * * * * Meanwhile the "crude little piece" returned to her old home, somewhat shaken in mind by what had happened to her. It never entered her little head to argue with the august officers of the trust company, who stood to her as the sacred symbol of Authority. She must buy a trunk, pack it, and be at the Eclair Hotel in B---- by noon on the following Friday. Those were her orders. She looked wonderingly at the two hundred dollar check which Mr. Gardiner had given her for the expense of making herself ready. She had never before seen two hundred dollars. She knew only abstractly by the way of her arithmetic that such vast sums of money existed. And now she was expected to spend this fortune in the space of three days upon herself. She folded up the slip of paper and tucked it carefully into her purse. When she presented it at one of the shops in the Square in payment for the cheap trunk she had selected, she started a local sensation. By the time the check had traveled from the clerk to the proprietor and thence to the River National Bank, which did not take long, it was known in that busy neighborhood that Clark's Field had made good at last! Here was ready money from it as evidence. Adelle Clark was in fact the heiress that her mother Addie had been in fancy. The manager of the livery-stable may have had his regrets for the light manner in which he had treated old Pike's suggestion. He drove the girl himself into B---- on Friday with her new trunk strapped behind the closed carriage and touched his high hat when she dismounted before the flunky-guarded doors of the hotel. Adelle did not notice the hat business: she gave her old friend and best "roomer" her hand as she said good-bye, then slowly mounted the stone steps of the hotel. And that was the last that Church Street saw of the Clarks. The liveryman, slowly retracing his way across the bridge to Alton, mused upon the picture that the little girl presented in her blue school suit, going up the steps of the Eclair Hotel. It was all like a stage story, he felt, and he thought long about the Clarks, whom he had known for two generations and about human fate generally. He summed up his reflections in one enigmatic exclamation,--"That blamed old pasture!" Adelle was an "heiress." Already she had been whisked away from Church Street to her new life. And all because of "that blamed old pasture"--otherwise Clark's Field. XI