"Why, Mrs. Rose, it's awfully good of you--but----" "Oh, do!" Toni spoke eagerly, and the woman who stood by turned to her impulsively. "Are you offering to take us home in your car?" Her voice was full of Irish melody. "It is very kind of you--and for myself, I'm so tired I'd accept with pleasure. But"--there was something malignant in the glance she gave her husband--"perhaps we'd better wait for a cab." "Oh, do come, please," Toni begged, her bright eyes pleading to be allowed to do this little service. "It's a big car, and I'm all alone in it." "Very well." Mrs. Herrick turned to her husband. "Come along, Jim; the luggage can come on later." And in less than five minutes the matter was arranged. Herrick elected to sit beside the chauffeur, so that Toni and her new acquaintance sat together in the body of the car. Mrs. Herrick's large and rather new-looking dressing-bag on the floor at their feet. Toni gave the direction to the openly interested Fletcher, and the car glided away through the group of loafers hanging round the station entrance, and settled down into a steady hum on the road leading to the Hope House. Toni seized a moment while Mrs. Herrick was busy with the fastening of her bag to steal a look at her companion; and in that brief glance she received two distinct impressions--one that Eva Herrick was a bitterly unhappy woman, the other that she had no intention of allowing other people to escape from her own aura of bitterness. In person Mrs. Herrick was short and slight, with a look of finish about her probably handed down through generations of her Irish ancestors. Her small features were cut as clearly as a cameo, and her short upper lip, while giving her an air of pride which was unpleasing, was in itself beautiful. Her eyes, the big Irish eyes which had first enslaved Herrick, were lovely in shape and colour, but they were encircled by disfiguring blue shadows, and the fine skin had a tell-tale pallor which spoke of long indoor confinement. Her hair, by nature crisp and golden, looked dull and lifeless in the shadow of her hat; and over the whole dainty face and figure there was an indefinable blight, a sort of shadow which dimmed and blurred their naturally clean and clear contours. As she removed her gloves to fumble with the lock of her bag. Toni noticed that the small, well-shaped hands were rough and badly kept; and Toni's soft heart was wrung by these evidences of a sordid, toilsome past. Suddenly Mrs. Herrick sat upright and gazed at Toni with a look which held something of criticism. "You live down here I suppose?" "Yes. We live at Greenriver, about a mile from your bungalow." "Ah. Been here long?" "Only a few months." "I see. You haven't known my husband very long, then?" "No. He pulled me out of the river one day," said Toni, "and we have seen him pretty often during the summer."