Miss Kate did not argue the point. She put the freshly painted wooden chicken on the table to dry in the sun. Her eyes fell upon a letter bearing an American postmark and addressed to Sergeant Chester Ball, with a lot of cryptic figures and letters strung out after it, such as A.E.F. and Co. 11. "Here's a letter for you!" She infused a lot of Glad into her voice. But Chet only cast a languid eye upon it and said, "Yeh?" "I'll read it to you, shall I? It's a nice fat One." Chet sat back, indifferent, negatively acquiescent. And Miss Kate began to read in her clear young voice, there in the sunshine and scent of the centuries-old English garden. It marked an epoch in Chet's life--that letter. But before we can appreciate it we'll have to know Chester Ball in his Chicago days. Your true lineman has a daredevil way with the women, as have all men whose calling is a hazardous one. Chet was a crack workman. He could shinny up a pole, strap his emergency belt, open his tool kit, wield his pliers with expert deftness, and climb down again in record time. It was his pleasure--and seemingly the pleasure and privilege of all lineman's gangs the world over--to whistle blithely and to call impudently to any passing petticoat that caught his fancy. Perched three feet from the top of the high pole he would cling, protected, seemingly, by some force working in direct defiance of the law of gravity. And now and then, by way of brightening the tedium of their job he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the street below, "Hoo-Hoo! Hello, sweetheart!" There was nothing vicious in it, Chet would have come to the aid of beauty in distress as quickly as Don Quixote. Any man with a blue shirt as clean, and a shave as smooth, and a haircut as round as Chet Ball's has no meanness in him. A certain dare-deviltry went hand in hand with his work--a calling in which a careless load dispatcher, a cut wire, or a faulty strap may mean instant death. Usually the girls laughed and called back to them or went on more quickly, the colour in their cheeks a little higher. But not Anastasia Rourke. Early the first morning of a two-weeks' job on the new plant of the Western Castings Company Chet Ball, glancing down from his dizzy perch atop an electric light pole, espied Miss Anastasia Rourke going to work. He didn't know her name nor anything about her, except that she was pretty. You could see that from a distance even more remote than Chet's. But you couldn't know that Stasia was a lady not to be trifled with. We know her name was Rourke, but he didn't. So then: "Hoo-Hoo!" he had called. "Hello, sweetheart! Wait for me and I'll be down." Stasia Rourke had lifted her face to where he perched so high above the streets. Her cheeks were five shades pinker than was their wont, which would make them border on the red.