He was trying at this instant to look rather more as if he were likely to meet one of his own friends than one of his mother's. His mother's friends would not have understood his personal chaperonage of the shabby little girl at his elbow. Her hair was not even properly brushed. It looked frazzled and tangled; and at the corner of one of her big blue eyes, streaking diagonally across the pallor in which it was set, was a line of dirt,--a tear mark, it might have been, though that didn't make the general effect any less untidy, David thought; only a trifle more uncomfortably pathetic. She was a nice little girl, that fact was becoming more and more apparent to David, but any friend of his mother's would have wondered, and expressed him or herself as wondering, why in the name of all sensitiveness he had not taken a taxicab, or at least something in the nature of a closed vehicle, if he felt himself bound to deliver in person this curious little stranger to whatever mysterious destination she was for. "I thought you'd like a hansom, Eleanor, better than a taxi-cab, because you can see more. You've never been in this part of New York before, I understand." "No, sir." "You came up from Colhassett last Saturday, didn't you? Mrs. O'Farrel wrote to your grandmother to send you on to us, and you took the Saturday night boat from Fall River." "Yes, sir." "Did you travel alone, Eleanor?" "A friend of Grandpa's came up on the train with me, and left me on the vessel. He told the colored lady and gentleman to see if I was all right,--Mr. Porter and Mrs. Steward." "And were you all right?" David's eyes twinkled. "Yes, sir." "Not sea sick, nor homesick?" The child's fine-featured face quivered for a second, then set again into impassive stoic lines, and left David wondering whether he had witnessed a vibration of real emotion, or the spasmodic twitching of the muscles that is so characteristic of the rural public school. "I wasn't sea sick." "Tell me about your grandparents, Eleanor." Then as she did not respond, he repeated a little sharply, "Tell me about your grandparents, won't you?" The child still hesitated. David bowed to the wife of a Standard Oil director in a passing limousine, and one of the season's prettiest debutantes, who was walking; and because he was only twenty-four, and his mother was very, very ambitious for him, he wondered if the tear smudge on the face of his companion had been evident from the sidewalk, and decided that it must have been. "I don't know how to tell," the child said at last, "I don't know what you want me to say." "I don't want you to say anything in particular, just in general, you know."