“Come in, girl,” ordered Mrs. Cosgrove.  “What happened to you?”

Dagmar was bewildered.  What had happened to her?  What should she answer!

“I am—­away—­from home,” she managed to reply.  “The officer said I could go back tomorrow.”

The inadequacy of her reply sounded foolish even to Dagmar, but she was constrained to feel her way.  She could never blurt out the fact that she had actually run away from home!

“Oh, I see,” said Mrs. Cosgrove with a tone of uncertainty.  “Run away, eh?”

“Yes’m,” said Dagmar defencelessly.

“Too bad.  Didn’t your folks treat you right?”

“Oh, yes,” hurried Dagmar to correct any such impression as that question conveyed.  “But I wanted to help them—­all, and I thought I—­could!”

Tears were running over now, and Dagmar’s courage was at lowest ebb.  The motherly woman took the ever-present “telescope,” and setting it down in a corner of the pleasant room, directed Dagmar to a chair near the little stove, in which a small light glowed, quite suitably opposed to the chill of early spring.

“Just sit down and I’ll get you a bite.  Of course you are hungry.”

“Not very,” gulped the girl, who had not tasted food since she snapped the cover on her lunch box that eventful noon day, when the girl, having agreed with Tessie to leave Milltown, had eaten the dark bread and bologna, for what she supposed would be the last time.  So Dagmar was hungry, although her emotion for the time was choking her, and hiding the pangs of actual hunger.

“All the same tea tastes good when we use up nerves,” insisted the woman, leaving the room, and presently clicking dishes and utensils in the kitchen.  Left alone for a moment Dagmar recovered her composure and glanced about the room.  It seemed almost fragrant in its clean freshness.  She had never occupied such a room, with that peculiar, bracing atmosphere.  The small mantel with its prim vases looked a veritable home shrine, and the center table with the sprigs of budding lilacs, seemed to the forlorn girl something to reverence.  The rag rugs under her feet were so spotless, the curtains so white—­it suddenly occurred to the girl these things could not exist in the smoke and grim of a mill town.  It was the mill—­always the mill found to blame for her misery.

“Come on, girl—­what is your name?” came a voice from the kitchen.

Dagmar responded and took her place at the table with its white oilcloth cover, and a snowy napkin neatly smoothed under the one plate set for her.

“Molly has gone to Flosston to a Girl Scout meeting,” announced Mrs. Cosgrove, helping Dagmar to a dish of home-made pork and beans.  “She loves the Scout affairs, and wouldn’t miss a rally, even if she has to come home a little late.  Martin, that’s my boy, will meet her at the jitney.”

“Gone to Flosston?” repeated Dagmar.  “That’s where I came from—­ that is the corner we call Milltown, it is out where the factories are.”