charged with overseeing the destinies of friendless girls who were members of his parish, had made inquiries. Moreover, Mr. Prentiss had agreed that two young people, situated as they were, whose hearts were united, did well to marry on a small income and trust somewhat to the future. How otherwise, as he sagely remarked, was ideal love to flourish, and were mercenary considerations to be kept at bay? Emil was twenty-five, and she just twenty. Youthful, but still of a proper age, and they were growing older every day. Decidedly it was a prudent love-match, and she had a right to be joyful, for there was nothing to reproach herself with or to regret. It will thus be observed that Constance Forbes was no happy-go-lucky sort of girl, and that though she was marrying younger than she had expected, she was marrying with her eyes open. She had scrutinized severely the romantic episode which had made her and her lover acquainted, and had even refused him the first time he asked her in order to counterbalance the glamour resulting from that meeting. The episode was a sequel to an accident to the train on which she was travelling from Colton to Benham. The engine ran into the rear of some freight cars, owing to a misplaced switch, and the tracks were strewed with splintered merchandise, so that the train was delayed four hours. The natural thing for passengers with time to kill was to inspect the wreckage, which, besides the dilapidated railroad apparatus, consisted of mangled chairs and tables, and bursted bags of grain, a medley of freight impressive in its disorder. Constance found herself presently discussing with a young man the injuries to the cow-catcher of the engine, which had been twisted ludicrously awry. A moment before two other persons, one of them a woman, had been on the spot, and the conversation had been innocuously general, but they had drifted off. Constance was conscious of having noticed the young man in her car, and of having casually observed that he had an alert expression, and that his hair rose perpendicularly from his brow, suggesting the assertiveness of a king-bird. To allow a young man to scrape acquaintance with her in cold blood would ordinarily have been entirely repugnant to her ideas of maidenly propriety, but she resisted her first impulse to turn her back on him and abruptly close the interview as needlessly harsh. It would surely be prudish to abstain from examining the battered locomotive, which lay on one side, with its nose in the air, as though it had fallen in the act of rearing, merely because a respectable-looking male passenger happened to be equally interested in the results of the catastrophe. So it chanced that after they had exchanged observations concerning the injuries to the overthrown "Vulcan" and speculated as to how long they were likely to be delayed, their conversation became less impersonal. That is, the young man informed her that he was in the employ of Toler & Company,