Joe Boyd, in tattered shirt, trousers patched upon patches, and gaping shoes through which his bare toes showed, stood in the doorway. That the old beau and the once most popular young man of the country-side could stand looking like that before her, even after the lapse of all those trying years, and not feel abashed, was one of the inexplicable things that rushed through Jane Hemingway’s benumbed brain. That she, herself, could be looking at the very husk of the ideal of manhood she had held all those years and not cry out in actual pain over the pitiful evidences of his collapse from his high estate was another thing she marvelled over. Joe Boyd! Could it actually be he? Could those gaunt, talon-nailed members, with their parchment-like skin, be the hands she used to think so shapely? Could those splaying feet be the feet that had tripped more lightly in the Virginia Reel than those of any other man for miles around? Could those furtive, harsh-glancing eyes be the deep, dreamy ones in which she had once seen the mirage of her every girlish hope? Could that rasping tone come from the voice whose never diminishing echo had rung in her ears through all those years of hiding her secret from the man she had married out of "spite," through all her long tooth-in-flesh fight with the rival who had temporarily won and held him? She rose and gave him her hand, and the two stood facing each other, she speechless, he thoroughly at his indolent ease. "Well, I reckon, Jane, old girl," he laughed, as he wiped a trickling stream of tobacco-juice from the corner of his sagging mouth, "that you are the very last human being I ever expected to lay eyes on again. I swear I wouldn’t ’a’ known you from Adam’s cat if Nettie hadn’t told me who it was. My, how thin you look, and all bent over!" "Yes, I’m changed, and you are too, Joe," she said, as, with a stiff hand beneath her, she sought the chair again. "Yes"—he went to the doorway and spat voluminously out into the yard, and came back swinging a chair as lightly in his hand as if it had been a baseball bat with which he was playing—"yes, I reckon I am altered considerable; a body’s more apt to see changes in others than in himself. I was just thinking the other day about them old times. La me! how much fun we all did have, but it didn’t last—it didn’t last." He sat down, leaning forward and clasping his dry-palmed hands with a sound like the rubbing together of two pieces of paper. There was an awkward silence. Nettie Lawson came to the door and glanced in inquiringly, and then went away. They heard her calling her chickens some distance from the cabin. "No, I wouldn’t have recognized you if I’d met you alone in the big road," he said, "nor you wouldn’t me, I reckon." "Joe"—she was looking about the room—"somehow I had an idea that you were in—in a little better circumstances than—than you seem to be in now."