Her heart fairly sang as she paid for Teddy’s supper, the lovely brown hills of California slipping past the windows of the dining car.  The waiter was solicitous; would the lady have just a salad?  No, said the lady, she did not feel hungry.  She and Teddy went out to breathe the glorious air of the mountains from the observation car, and to flash and clatter through the snow sheds.

And what a delight it was to be young and free and to have this splendid child all for her own, thought Martie, her heart swelling with a wonderful peace.  Everybody liked Teddy, and Teddy’s touching happiness at being alone with his adored mother opened her eyes to the feeling that had been hidden under a child’s inarticulateness all these months.

The two hundred dollars between her and destitution might have been two million; she was rich.  She could treat the troubled, pale little mother and the two children from the next section to lemonades every afternoon, and when they reached Chicago, hot and sunshiny at last, she and Teddy spent the day loitering through a big department store.  Here Teddy was given a Boy Scout suit, and Martie bought herself a cake of perfumed soap whose odour, whenever she caught it in after times, brought back the enchanting emotion of these first days of independence.

Tired, dirty, they were sitting together late in the afternoon of the fifth day, when she felt a sudden tug at her heart.  Outside the car window, slipping steadily by, were smoke-stained brick factories, and little canals and backwaters soiled with oil and soot, and heaps of slag and scrap iron and clinkers.  Then villages swept by—­flat, orderly villages with fences enclosing summer gardens.  Then factories again—­villages—­factories—­no more of the flat, bare fields:  the fields were all of the West.

But suddenly above this monotonous scene Martie noticed a dull glow that grew rosier and steadier as the early evening deepened.  Up against the first early stars the lights of New York climbed in a wide bar of pink and gold, flung a quivering bar of red.

She was back again!  Back in the great city.  She belonged once more to the seething crowds in the Ghetto, to the cool arcades between the great office buildings, to Broadway with its pushing crowds of shoppers, to the Bronx teeming with tiny shops and swung with the signs of a thousand apartments to let.  The hotels, with their uniformed starters, the middle Forties, with their theatrical boarding-houses, the tiny experimental art shops and tea shops and gift shops that continually appear and disappear among the basements of old brown-stone houses—­she was back among them all!

Tears of joy and excitement came to her eyes.  She pressed her face eagerly beside the child’s face at the window.

“Look down, Ted, that’s the East Side, dear, with all the children playing; do you remember?  And see all the darling awnings flapping!”

“I shouldn’t wonder if we should have an electric storm!” said Teddy, finding the old phrase easily, his warm little cheek against hers.