We came down from Cathedral Heights; and as we boarded a train on the elevated, eyes peered around newspapers. An old gentleman wiped his glasses and readjusted them, his lips forming the words, "most extraordinary," and again, "most extraordinary!" A thin, transparent-looking woman followed the direction of his glance and querulously touched his elbow. Two slender girls looked and whispered. I thought at first that city folks had no manners, but presently began to wonder that Helen escaped so easily. She had drawn down a scrap of a veil that scarcely obscured her glow and colour and, as the train gathered headway, our neighbours settled in their places almost as unconcernedly as if no marvel of beauty and youth were present. Indeed, most of them had never looked up. The two young girls continued to eye Helen with envy; and I was conscious of an absurd feeling of resentment that they were the only ones. I wanted to get up and cry out: "Don't you people know that this car contains a miracle?" Why, when Helen lifted to her knee a child that tugged at the skirts of the stout German hausfrau in the next seat, the mother vouchsafed hardly a glance. "How old are you?" asked Helen. "Sechs yahre," was the shy answer. "Such a big girl for six!" "So grosse! So grosse!" The little thing measured her height by touching her forehead. "Shump down," admonished the mother stolidly, while Helen bent over the child, wasting upon her the most wonderful smile of the everlasting years. "It was long ago, wasn't it," Nelly asked, when the child had slid from her lap, "that Uncle promised to take you into his office?" "Yes," I said. "When Father died, the Judge told me that when I had practised three years--long enough to admit me to the New York bar--he'd have a place for me. It was because the three years were nearly up, you know, that I dared last June to ask you--" "You'd dare anything," she interrupted hastily. "Remember how, when I was a Freshman, you raced a theologue down the church aisle one Sunday night after service, and slammed the door from the outside? 'Miss Winship,' you said--I had sat near the door and was already in the entry--'may I see you home?'--" "The theologue and the congregation didn't get out till you said yes, I remember! They howled and hammered at the door in most unchristian rage?" "I _had_ to say yes; why, I had to walk with you even when we quarrelled; it would have made talk for either of us to be seen alone." She breathed a sigh that ended in rippling laughter. "You'll have to say yes again." But at that she changed the subject, and we talked about her work at Barnard until we left the train at Fourteenth Street, where we met the flood tide of Christmas surging into the shops and piling up against gaily decked show windows.