Hidden Creek | Page 4

own and I can manage gels. I know how. Do you know my nickname? Well--say--it's 'Pap.' Pap Hudson. I'm the adopting kind. Sort of paternal, I guess. Kids and dogs follow me in the streets. You want a recommend? Just call up Mr. Hazeldean on the telephone. He's the man that fetched me here to buy that picture off Poppa."
"Oh," said Sheila, daughter of Mark who looked at stars, "of course I shouldn't think of asking for a recommendation. You've been only too kind--"
He put his hand on her shoulder in its thin covering and patted it, wondering at the silken, cool feeling against his palm.
"Kind, Miss Arundel? Pshaw! My middle name's 'Kind' and that's the truth. Why, how does the song go--''T is love, 't is love that makes the world go round'--love's just another word for kindness, ain't it? And it's not such a bad old world either, eh?"
Without knowing it, with the sort of good luck that often attends the enterprises of such men, Hudson had used a spell. He had quoted, almost literally, her father's last words and she felt that it was a message from the other side of death.
She twisted about in her chair, took his hand from her shoulder, and drew it, stiff and sallow, to her young lips.
"Oh," she sobbed, "you're kind! It is a good world if there are such men as you!"
When Sylvester Hudson went down the stairs a minute or two after Sheila's impetuous outbreak, his sallow face was deeply flushed. He stopped to tell the Irishwoman who rented the garret floor to the Arundels, that Sheila's future was in his care. During this colloquy, pure business on his side and mixed business and sentiment on Mrs. Halligan's, Sylvester did not once look the landlady in the eye. His own eyes skipped hers, now across, now under, now over. There are some philanthropists who are overcome with such bashfulness in the face of their own good deeds. But, sitting back alone in his taxicab on his way to the station to buy Sheila's ticket to Millings, Sylvester turned his emerald rapidly about on his finger and whistled to himself. And cryptically he expressed his glow of gratified fatherliness.
"As smooth as silk," said Sylvester aloud.

CHAPTER III
THE FINEST CITY IN THE WORLD
So Sheila Arundel left the garret where the stars pressed close, and went with Sylvester Hudson out into the world. It was, that morning, a world of sawing wind, of flying papers and dust-dervishes, a world, to meet which people bent their shrinking faces and drew their bodies together as against the lashing of a whip. Sheila thought she had never seen New York so drab and soulless; it hurt her to leave it under so desolate an aspect.
"Cheery little old town, isn't it?" said Sylvester. "Gee! Millings is God's country all right."
On the journey he put Sheila into a compartment, supplied her with magazines and left her for the most part to herself--for which isolation she was grateful. With her compartment door ajar, she could see him in his section, when he was not in the smoking-car, or rather she could see his lean legs, his long, dark hands, and the top of his sleek head. The rest was an outspread newspaper. Occasionally he would come into the compartment to read aloud some bit of information which he thought might interest her. Once it was the prowess of a record-breaking hen; again it was a joke about a mother-in-law; another time it was the Hilliard murder case, a scandal of New York high-life, the psychology of which intrigued Sylvester.
"Isn't it queer, though, Miss Arundel, that such things happen in the slums and they happen in the smart set, but they don't happen near so often with just plain folks like you and me! Isn't this, now, a real Tenderloin Tale--South American wife and American husband and all their love affairs, and then one day her up and shooting him! Money," quoth Sylvester, "sure makes love popular. Now for that little ro-mance, poor folks would hardly stop a day's work, but just because the Hilliards here have po-sition and spon-dulix, why, they'll run a couple of columns about 'em for a week. What's your opinion on the subject, Miss Arundel?"
He was continually asking this, and poor Sheila, strange, bewildered, oppressed by his intrusion into her uprooted life, would grope wildly through her odds and ends of thought and find that on most of the subjects that interested him, she had no opinions at all.
"You must think I'm dreadfully stupid, Mr. Hudson," she faltered once after a particularly deplorable failure.
"Oh, you're a kid, Miss Sheila, that's all your trouble. And I reckon you're half asleep, eh? Kind of brought up on pictures and country walks, in--what's the name of the foreign