Adelle seemed wholly absorbed in the bricks and mortar laid upon old Clark's Field. She did not speak. It would be impossible to say what she was thinking of.... At last, as they emerged from another long stretch of narrow street bordered on either side by high tenements that were varied according to a machine pattern by different colored bricks, Archie protested. He growled,--"Well, haven't you seen enough of this sort of thing to last you awhile?" Adelle gave the order to retrace their journey to the hotel. She looked back into the dreary maze with her wide gray eyes, and now they were not quite empty eyes as they had been in the probate courtroom. She looked and looked as if she were seeing the past as well as the present, as if she were trying to fathom what Judge Orcutt had meant. When the Field faded into the distance behind the rapid car, she sank back into her corner with an unconscious sigh. Archie had taken a cigarette from the little gold case that had been one of Adelle's first presents to him, and as he lighted it skillfully in face of the wind was doubtless thinking that never again would he be misled into going to Clark's Field. On the way back Adelle ordered the driver to stop in the Square, and despite Archie's protest that it was already long past lunch-time she left him in the car and turned down the side street that led to the old rooming-house. It was gone! In its place was a five-story flat building that occupied not only all their yard, but the livery-stable lot as well. Adelle realized the change with a positive shock. Latterly, since the little lecture by the probate judge, the images of her early life had come back to her mind as they had not for years. The transformation of Clark's Field did not matter so much even: it had not been in the immediate horizon of her youth,--more an idea than a physical possession. But Church Street and the rooming-house and the livery-stable--they had been her very self. She felt strangely as she had seven years before when she was returning to her aunt's house after the funeral of the widow. The last of all her landmarks had been swept away.... She returned to the car with a thoughtful face, and all the way into the city she paid no attention to Archie's chatter, her mind far away, busy with her forlorn little past. Once or twice she wondered what the judge had meant by urging her to take her husband to see Clark's Field. But she was glad that she had gone. She should have visited Alton sometime or other she supposed to see what the old place was like;--she must remember to go to the cemetery before they left B---- and look for her aunt's grave. But this was not all that the judge meant, Adelle suspected. She was not to discover for some years the full, fine meaning of the judge's intention, perhaps might never recognize all the implications of his message to her on her twenty-first birthday. XXX