"Kind, Miss Arundel? Pshaw! My middle name's 'Kind' and that's the truth. Why, how does the song go--''T is love, 't is love that makes the world go round'--love's just another word for kindness, ain't it? And it's not such a bad old world either, eh?" Without knowing it, with the sort of good luck that often attends the enterprises of such men, Hudson had used a spell. He had quoted, almost literally, her father's last words and she felt that it was a message from the other side of death. She twisted about in her chair, took his hand from her shoulder, and drew it, stiff and sallow, to her young lips. "Oh," she sobbed, "you're kind! It _is_ a good world if there are such men as you!" When Sylvester Hudson went down the stairs a minute or two after Sheila's impetuous outbreak, his sallow face was deeply flushed. He stopped to tell the Irishwoman who rented the garret floor to the Arundels, that Sheila's future was in his care. During this colloquy, pure business on his side and mixed business and sentiment on Mrs. Halligan's, Sylvester did not once look the landlady in the eye. His own eyes skipped hers, now across, now under, now over. There are some philanthropists who are overcome with such bashfulness in the face of their own good deeds. But, sitting back alone in his taxicab on his way to the station to buy Sheila's ticket to Millings, Sylvester turned his emerald rapidly about on his finger and whistled to himself. And cryptically he expressed his glow of gratified fatherliness. "As smooth as silk," said Sylvester aloud. CHAPTER III THE FINEST CITY IN THE WORLD So Sheila Arundel left the garret where the stars pressed close, and went with Sylvester Hudson out into the world. It was, that morning, a world of sawing wind, of flying papers and dust-dervishes, a world, to meet which people bent their shrinking faces and drew their bodies together as against the lashing of a whip. Sheila thought she had never seen New York so drab and soulless; it hurt her to leave it under so desolate an aspect. "Cheery little old town, isn't it?" said Sylvester. "Gee! Millings is God's country all right." On the journey he put Sheila into a compartment, supplied her with magazines and left her for the most part to herself--for which isolation she was grateful. With her compartment door ajar, she could see him in his section, when he was not in the smoking-car, or rather she could see his lean legs, his long, dark hands, and the top of his sleek head. The rest was an outspread newspaper. Occasionally he would come into the compartment to read aloud some bit of information which he thought might interest her. Once it was the prowess of a record-breaking hen; again it was a joke about a mother-in-law; another time it was the Hilliard murder case, a scandal of New York high-life, the psychology of which intrigued Sylvester.