The black-and-white line had been young Jesse Dick, of the "Hardscrabble" Dicks; the black had been his trousers, the white his shirt. He swam like a river rat--which he more or less was. Of all the Chicago male inhabitants to whom Mrs. Thrift would most have objected as the rescuer of her small daughter, this lounging, good-for-nothing young Jesse Dick would have been most prominently ineligible. Fortunately (or unfortunately) she did not even know his name until five years later. Charlotte herself did not know it. She had had one frantic glimpse of a wet, set face above hers, but it had been only a flash in a kaleidoscopic whole. Young Dick, having towed her ashore, had plumped her down, retrieved his coat, and lounged off unmissed and unrecognized in the ensuing hubbub. The rescue accomplished, his seventeen-year-old emotions found no romantic stirrings in the thought of this limp and dripping bundle of corded muslin, bedraggled pantalettes, and streaming, stringy hair. Charlotte, put promptly to bed of course, with a pan at her feet and flannel on her chest and hot broth administered at intervals--though she was no whit the worse for her ducking--lay very flat and still under the gay calico comfortable, her hair in two damp braids, her eyes wide and thoughtful. "But who was he?" insisted Mrs. Thrift, from the foot of the bed. And "I don't know," replied Charlotte for the dozenth time. "What did he look like?" demanded Isaac Thrift (hastily summoned from his place of business so near the scene of the mishap). "I--don't know," replied Charlotte. And that, bafflingly enough, was the truth. Only sometimes in her dreams she saw his face again, white, set, and yet with something almost merry about it. From these dreams Charlotte would wake shivering deliciously. But she never told them. During the next five years she never went to a dance, a sleigh-ride, walked or rode, that she did not unconsciously scan the room or the street for his face. Five years later Charlotte was shopping on Lake Street in her second-best merino, voluminously hooped. Fortunately (she thought later, devoutly) she had put on her best bonnet of sage green velvet with the frill of blond lace inside the face. A frill of blond lace is most flattering when set inside the bonnet. She had come out of her father's store and was bound for the shop of Mr. Potter Palmer where, the week before, she had flirted with a plum-colored pelisse and had known no happiness since then. She must feel it resting on her own sloping shoulders. Of course it was--but then, Mr. Palmer, when he waited on you himself, often came down in his price. Chicago sidewalks were crazy wooden affairs raised high on rickety stilts, uneven, full of cracks for the unwary, now five steps up, now six steps down, with great nails raising their ugly heads to bite at unsuspecting draperies. Below this structure lay a morass of mud, and woe to him who stepped into it.