Mrs. Murray was still wider awake to this truth when she went the next day to the Grand Central Station to wait for the arrival of her Colorado orphan.  The Chicago express glided in as gracefully and silently as though it were in quite the best society, and had run a thousand miles or so only for gentle exercise before dining at Delmonico’s and passing an evening at the opera.  Among the crowd of passengers who passed out were several women whose appearance gave Mrs. Murray a pang of fear, but at length she caught sight of one who pleased her fastidious eye.  “I hope it is she,” broke from her lips as the girl came towards her, and a moment later her hope was gratified.  She drew a breath of relief that made her light-hearted.  Whatever faults the girl might have, want of charm was not among them.  As she raised her veil, the engine-stoker, leaning from his engine above them, nodded approval.  In spite of dust and cinders, the fatigue and exposure of two thousand miles or so of travel, the girl was fresh as a summer morning, and her complexion was like the petals of a sweetbrier rose.  Her dark blue woollen dress, evidently made by herself, soothed Mrs. Murray’s anxieties more completely than though it had come by the last steamer from the best modiste in Paris.

“Is it possible you have come all the way alone?” she asked, looking about with lurking suspicion of possible lovers still to be revealed.

“Only from Chicago,” answered Catherine; “I stopped awhile there to rest, but I had friends to take care of me.”

“And you were not homesick or lonely?”

“No!  I made friends on the cars.  I have been taking care of a sick lady and her three children, who are all on their way to Europe, and wanted to pay my expenses if I would go with them.”

“I don’t wonder!” said Mrs. Murray with an unusual burst of sympathy.

No sooner had they fairly reached the house than Esther came to see the stranger and found her aunt in high spirits.  “She is as natural and sweet as a flower,” said Mrs. Murray.  “To be sure she has a few Western tricks; she says she stopped awhile at Chicago, and that she has a raft of things in her trunks, and she asks haeow, and says aeout; but so do half the girls in New York, and I will break her of it in a week so that you will never know she was not educated in Boston and finished in Europe.  I was terribly afraid she would wear a linen duster and water-waves.”

Catherine became a favorite on the spot.  No one could resist her hazel eyes and the curve of her neck, or her pure complexion which had the transparency of a Colorado sunrise.  Her good nature was inexhaustible, and she occasionally developed a touch of sentiment which made Mr. Murray assert that she was the most dangerous coquette within his experience.  Mr. Murray, who had a sound though uncultivated taste for pretty girls, succumbed to her charms, while George Strong, whose good nature was very like her own, never tired of drawing her out and enjoying her comments on the new life about her.