But some one had seized the bags and with them he was dragged ingloriously to the platform. Jane came next, crimson with embarrassment. She hurried down the steps and waited at the bottom for her mother to appear. As might have been expected of one so truly theatric, Josephine delayed her appearance until the stage was clear, so to speak. She even went so far as to keep her audience waiting. Preceded by the Pullman porter, who up to this time had remained invisible but now appeared as a proud and shining minion bearing boxes and traveling cases, wraps and furs, she at length appeared, stopping on the last step to survey, with well-affected surprise and a charming assumption of consternation, the crowd that packed the platform. Recovering herself with admirable aplomb, she rested her hand gracefully upon the brass rail and bowed to the right and the left and straight before her; the rigid smile with which every successful actress nightly envelops her audience in response to curtain calls parted her carmine lips while her big eyes ranged with sightless intensity over a void studded with what their fatuous owners were prone to call faces. Just as she was on the point of stepping down to the platform, her attention seemed suddenly to have been caught and held by an object off to the left at an elevation of perhaps ten feet above the heads of the spectators. She studied this object smilingly for thirty or forty seconds. As many as a dozen kodaks clicked during this brief though providential period of inactivity on her part. Now, a great many—perhaps all—of those who made up the eager, curious crowd, expected to behold a young and radiant Josephine Judge; they had seen her in the illustrated Sunday supplements and in the pictorial magazines; always she was sprightly and vivid and alluring. They were confronted, instead, by a tall, angular woman of fifty-two or-three, carelessly—even “sloppily”—dressed in a slouchy two-piece pepper and salt tweed walking costume, a glistening black straw hat that sat well down upon a mass of bright auburn hair—(old-timers in the crowd remembered her jet black tresses)—stout English oxfords somewhat run down at the heel, and a neck piece of white fur. What most of the observers at first took to be a wad of light brown fur tucked under her right arm was discovered later to be a beady-eyed “Pekinese.” But the minister’s wife was still a vividly handsome woman; the years had put their lines at the corners of her eyes, to be sure, and had pressed the fullness out of her cheeks, but they had not dimmed the luster of her eyes nor sobered the smile that played about her mirthful lips. She had taken good care of herself; she had made a business of keeping young in looks as well as in spirit.