Daisy Herself

Transcriber's Note: Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.

WILL E. INGERSOLL
Author of The Road that led Home , The Centenarian etc.
TORONTO THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY LIMITED
Copyright, Canada, 1920 THE MUSSON BOOK CO., LIMITED PUBLISHERS TORONTO

DAISY HERSELF
Daisy had run away from her home on the farm outside Toddburn village with this young store clerk, Beatty, who now sat holding her hand in the moonlight flyer of the M. & N. Beatty, who came originally from the city, was a bad young rascal; and Daisy—who, neglected and exposed to temptation since her earliest girlhood, had developed an innate awareness of fellows —knew it. None of her several reasons for this escapade had been the usual one—love. It suited her, however, to let Beatty think that she had come prepared to follow him to the world's end—a lengthy journey, upon which the railway ticket Beatty had bought for her was only good for the first two hundred miles.
Daisy was proceeding daringly, easily, without pause or regret, toward whatever lay in store for her along the path she had taken. Her locomotion was that of a thing which is both propelled and drawn. The propulsive force was her hatred of the farm where she had drudged for all the workable years of her seventeen under that plebeian taskmaster, stolid, selfish John Nixon, her stepfather, and that unmaternal mother whose forename, by some perpetuated sarcasm, was Lovina. The drawing force was Daisy's own eager, vigorous, intrepid spirit of adventure—green maidenhood's hunger for the sensational new.
The car in which the two sat was not a sleeper, but an ordinary red-upholstered day coach. The two had boarded the train at Oak Lake, the first station east of Toddburn (where neither of them were known by the new station agent) at a little after midnight. They were due to reach the city between six and seven o'clock in the morning.
Even if the car had been a berth coach, and there had been opportunity for retirement, Daisy could not have slept. The hour, the situation, the novelty of the rushing, lamplit train (she had never been on a train before), kept every faculty ablaze and awake in a pleasant intoxication of excitement. Elbow on window-sill and chin in palm, the girl sat, glancing now out at the flying moonlit telegraph posts, now about the interior of the dingy branch-line passenger coach. All seemed fairylike to her eyes habituated only to prairie fallow and lea.