The usher closed his fist on the pittance she dropped into it and departed without comment. The porter advanced on her with a demand for "Tickets, please." She began to ransack her reticule with flurried haste, taking out of it a small purse, opening that, closing it, putting it back, taking it out, searching the reticule through, turning out a handkerchief, a few hairpins, a few trunk keys, a baggage check, a bottle of salts, a card or two and numerous other maidenly articles, restoring them to place, looking in the purse again, restoring that, closing the reticule, setting it down, shaking out a book she carried, opening her old valise, going through certain white things blushingly, closing it again, shaking her skirts, and shaking her head in bewilderment. She was about to open the reticule again, when the porter exclaimed: "I see it! Don't look no mo'. I see it!" When she cast up her eyes in despair, her hatbrim had been elevated enough to disclose the whereabouts of the tickets. With a murmured apology, he removed them from her teeth and held them under the light. After a time he said: "As neah as I can make out from the--the undigested po'tion of this ticket, yo' numba is six." "That's it--six!" "That's right up this way." "Let me sit here till I get my breath," she pleaded, "I ran so hard to catch the train." "Well, you caught it good and strong." "I'm so glad. How soon do we start?" "In about half a houah." "Really? Well, better half an hour too soon than half a minute too late." She said it with such a copy-book primness that the porter set her down as a school-teacher. It was not a bad guess. She was a missionary. With a pupil-like shyness he volunteered: "Yo' berth is all ready whenever you wishes to go to baid." He caught her swift blush and amended it to--"to retiah." "Retire?--before all the car?" said Miss Anne Gattle, with prim timidity. "No, thank you! I intend to sit up till everybody else has retired." The porter retired. Miss Gattle took out a bit of more or less useful fancy stitching and set to work like another Dorcas. Her needle had not dived in and emerged many times before she was holding it up as a weapon of defense against a sudden human mountain that threatened to crush her. A vague round face, huge and red as a rising moon, dawned before her eyes and from it came an uncertain voice: "Esscuzhe me, mad'm, no 'fensh intended." The words and the breath that carried them gave the startled spinster an instant proof that her vis-à-vis did not share her Prohibition principles or practices. She regarded the elephant with mouselike terror, and the elephant regarded the mouse with elephantine fright, then he removed himself from her landscape as quickly as he could and lurched along the aisle, calling out merrily to the porter: "Chauffeur! chauffeur! don't go so fasht 'round these corners."