"Isn't it queer, though, Miss Arundel, that such things happen in the slums and they happen in the smart set, but they don't happen near so often with just plain folks like you and me! Isn't this, now, a real Tenderloin Tale--South American wife and American husband and all their love affairs, and then one day her up and shooting him! Money," quoth Sylvester, "sure makes love popular. Now for that little ro-mance, poor folks would hardly stop a day's work, but just because the Hilliards here have po-sition and spon-dulix, why, they'll run a couple of columns about 'em for a week. What's your opinion on the subject, Miss Arundel?" He was continually asking this, and poor Sheila, strange, bewildered, oppressed by his intrusion into her uprooted life, would grope wildly through her odds and ends of thought and find that on most of the subjects that interested him, she had no opinions at all. "You must think I'm dreadfully stupid, Mr. Hudson," she faltered once after a particularly deplorable failure. "Oh, you're a kid, Miss Sheila, that's all your trouble. And I reckon you're half asleep, eh? Kind of brought up on pictures and country walks, in--what's the name of the foreign part?--Normandy? No friends of your own age? No beaux?" Sheila shook her head, smiling. Her flexible smile was as charming as a child's. It dawned on the gravity of her face with an effect of spring moonlight. In it there was some of the mischief of fairyland. "What _you_ need is--Millings," prescribed Sylvester. "Girlie and Babe will wake you up. Yes, and the boys. You'll make a hit in Millings." He contemplated her for an instant with his head on one side. "We ain't got anything like you in Millings." Sheila, looking out at the wide Nebraskan prairies that slipped endlessly past her window hour by hour that day, felt that she would not make a hit at Millings. She was afraid of Millings. Her terror of Babe and Girlie was profound. She had lived and grown up, as it were, under her father's elbow. Her adoration of him had stood between her and experience. She knew nothing of humanity except Marcus Arundel. And he was hardly typical--a shy, proud, head-in-the-air sort of man, who would have been greatly loved if he had not shrunk morbidly from human contacts. Sheila's Irish mother had wooed and won him and had made a merry midsummer madness in his life, as brief as a dream. Sheila was all that remained of it. But, for all her quietness, the shadow of his broken heart upon her spirit, she was a Puck. She could make laughter and mischief for him and for herself--not for any one else yet; she was too shy. But that might come. Only, Puck laughter is a little unearthly, a little delicate. The ear of Millings might not be attuned.... Just now, Sheila felt that she would never laugh again. Sylvester's humor certainly did not move her. She almost choked trying to swallow becomingly the mother-in-law anecdote.