Nobody had ever called her pretty, but her light serge skirt had that day been lengthened to her ankles, and Mary was wholly conscious of the new tokens of her growth. Lithe, strong-limbed and firm-bodied, of peasant stock and peasant vigor, youth and health and the open country air were not factors sufficiently unfamiliar to combine in a charm that would attract admiration in her own community. Only a jaded city-gaze--and a well-trained city-gaze at that--would have seen in the blue eyes, the red mouth, the straight nose, pink cheeks, and abundant russet hair, any promise worthy of fulfillment,--could have detected the flower in the bud; and that such a gaze should, on this day of all days, have been leveled in the girl's direction was, perhaps, only one of those grim jests of a Fate that loves to play upon the harmony between man and nature, and that here observed the coming of a human spring that must be brief and sudden, a human summer parching and intense. The usual group of idle residents and idling commercial drummers were sitting at the plate-glass window of the hotel as she went by, but the girl did not see them. Passing among objects of long familiarity, she saw, in fact, nothing until, in a side-street, she heard a rapid step behind her, was covered by an approaching shadow and, half-turning, found someone, a stranger, at her side. "How d'y'do, liddle girl?" Mary looked up; but she was quite too startled to observe anything save that the speaker--she could not have told whether he were man or boy--was at once dark and rosy, smiling and serious, hat in hand, and, beyond all speculation, no citizen of her own borough. "I don't know you," she said. She flushed quickly, and strode forward. It was, she knew, no uncommon thing for the girls of her acquaintance to be "picked up," as they called the process, by some fellow-townsman that had never been formally presented to them; but the process was, as she also knew, one that lost its propriety when extended to aliens. The present alien was, nevertheless, not easily to be dismissed. He fell into her gait, and walked facilely beside her. "I beg your _par_don," he said in the humblest and most unobjectionable tones. "I don't mean to be _rude_ to you, honest, I don't. I'm a traveling-man, you see----" Mary was striding rapidly ahead, her full mouth now drawn firm, her blue eyes fixed on the vanishing-point. "I don't care what you are," she answered. "All righd," he pleaded. "All I vant now is a chanc't to _exblain_. I've chust started out traveling for my fader, who's a big distiller in N'York. I've got to stay in this hole for a vhile, un' I'm not used to the _bees_ness, un' I'm lonesome, un' I only vondered if you vouldn't go vith me to a moving-picture show, or something, this evening."