that seemed a silly thing to tell her, for surely she knew it
anyway. He worried a good deal about her cough, which seemed to be
getting worse, and he had it all figured out that when cold weather
came he would have her come in where it was warm, and take her look
in there. He felt that he knew all about her, and though he did not
know her name, though he had never heard her speak one word, in some
ways he felt closer to her than to any one else in the world.

Yet if the old man had known just how it was with the girl it is
altogether unlikely that he would have understood. It would have
mystified and disappointed him had he known that she had never seen
a pine forest or a mountain in her life. Indeed there was a great
deal about the little girl which the old man, together with almost
all the rest of the world, would not have understood.

Not that the surface facts about her were either incomprehensible or
interesting. The tale of her existence would sound much like that of
a hundred other girls in the same city. Inquiry about her would have
developed the facts that she did typewriting for a land company,
that she did not seem to have any people, and lived at a big
boarding-house. At the boarding-house they would have told you that
she was a nice little thing, quiet as a mouse, and that it was too
bad she had to work, for she seemed more than half sick. There the
story would have rested, and the real things about her would not
have been touched.

She worked for the Chicago branch of a big Northwestern land
company. They dealt in the lands of Idaho, Montana, Oregon and
Washington. The things she sat at her typewriter and wrote were of
the wonders of that great country: the great timber lands, the