There was another pocket in the side of her skirt and she felt for that. There was the remainder of her trip ticket and some money. She had only put a small amount in her satchel and that was safe as well. Rescuers had been honest. Was it a token that she should go on? The official was in that afternoon and made her a general allowance, she thought, for her losses. There would be a through train at nine the next morning if she was able to go. "Could I see the--the other lady. How was the baby hurt?" "Oh, it was all crushed. The mother was killed. One of the passengers recognized her and the lady, and though you were stunned for a long while you came partly to, and called for your baby. So we brought it, and although you were not quite rational you were so happy with it and improved rapidly. You've been fortunate, ma'am." "Yes," with a queer, frightened sound. "She's a beautiful woman and belongs to the quality, but her hip is broken and her back twisted, and there's something hurt in her head. She can't live--we thought her dead in the night. It's a blessing the poor baby has gone." She lay like marble. A beautiful woman, truly. The eyelids with their long lashes looked as if they were carven. There was only an infrequent sign of respiration. "We hope we are on the track of some one belonging to her. The doctors want her moved to the hospital." The next morning Emma Boyd journeyed out to her brother's. A coarse, common, loud voiced farmer, rough and unkempt and five unruly children. She was appalled, and a dreary stretch of prairie land with hardly a neighbor in sight. Why she had been crazy to come! and she found farm work quite too hard for her. She had better be housemaid at Laconia, or go in the mills again. And when her brother found she had a little money he was eager to get hold of it. Yes, she had better return to her native town, especially as her brother was meaning to marry again. So she came back to Laconia which was a manufacturing town with iron mines at its elbow. There were varying fortunes as there often is with the poor. Mill work when she had to leave the child alone, then a boarding house which really prospered, but was sold with some other property for a big factory. Then housekeeping for a nervous invalid wife, and here she had met Mrs. Searing who had proved a true friend. After that sewing, making skirts for a dressmaker and working at childrens' clothes. When it was dull times they drew on the little fund. The girl was ambitious and had mapped out her own life, different from what her mother had planned. They loved each other but it was as if two foreign natures were trying to assimilate and there was no conformable ground for perfect harmony. Yes, she would take this last step for the girl's sake; she owed it to her. CHAPTER II A NEW OUTLOOK