Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the city room.djvu/169

 served as daily reminders. She still made so many inquiries among her friends that "Ruth Herrick's Miss Abbott" was jokingly referred to in newspaper circles as a journalistic "Mrs. Harris." "It is n't mere curiosity that moves me," Miss Herrick explained to the smiling ones; "I'd like to find her, for perhaps I might be able to do something for her. I don't believe she has too much money, not withstanding her reckless way of making gifts." As the months went on, the whirl of metropolitan news-getting swept into the back ground the memory of her strange caller. It was almost a year after her visit that Miss Herrick, sitting at her desk one stormy winter day, stopped her work long enough to glance at the copy of the evening paper which a boy had just placed at her elbow. Her eye fell on the "scare-head" of a sensational story on the first page. It set forth in heavy type the fact that a woman had just starved to death in a lonely little cottage, in a small town in New Jersey. She had been an educated woman,—a teacher. She had lived alone, and was apparently friendless;