"There isn't any use of our staying here very long, Eleanor," declared Madge, feeling a great wave of loneliness and fear sweep over her. "An accident must have happened to Tom's automobile on his way to the train to meet us. I am afraid we were foolish not to have stayed at the Jersey City station. I am sure Tom wrote he would meet us there. I have behaved like a perfect goose. It is because I boasted so much about not being frightened and knowing what to do. But I _do_ know Mrs. Curtis's address. We can take a cab and drive up there." Eleanor would fall in with Madge's plans to a certain point; then she would strike. Now she positively refused to get into a cab. Her mother and father and Miss Jenny Ann had warned her never to trust herself in a cab in a strange city. New York was too terrifying! Eleanor would search for Mrs. Curtis's home on foot, in a car, or a bus, but in a cab she would not ride. Madge was obliged to give in gracefully. A policeman showed the girls to a Twenty-third Street car. He explained that when they came to the Third Avenue L they must get out of the car and take the elevated train uptown, since Madge had explained to him that Mrs. Curtis lived on Seventieth Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues. There was only one point that the policeman failed to make clear to Eleanor and Madge. He neglected to tell them that elevated trains, as well as other cars, travel both up and down New York City, and the way to discover which way the "L" train is moving is to consult the signs on the steps that lead up to the elevated road. The policeman supposed that the two young women would make this observation for themselves. Of course, under ordinary circumstances, Madge and Nellie would have been more sensible, but they were frightened and confused at the bare idea of being alone in New York and consequently lost their heads, and they dashed up the Third Avenue elevated steps without looking for signs, settled themselves in the train and were off, as they supposed, for Seventieth Street. They were too much interested in gazing into upstairs windows, where hundreds of people were at work in tiny, dark rooms, to pay much attention to the first stops at stations that their train made. They knew they were still some distance from Mrs. Curtis's. Madge was completely fascinated at the spectacle of a fat, frowsy woman holding a baby by its skirt on the sill of a six-story tenement house. Just as the car went by the baby made a leap toward the train. Madge smothered her scream as the woman jerked the child out of danger just in time. Then it suddenly occurred to her that this was hardly the kind of neighborhood in which to find Mrs. Curtis's house. The sign at the next stop was a name and not a street number. It could not be possible that she and Eleanor had made another mistake! Madge hurried back to the end of the car to find the conductor.