No one but the doctor himself was preparing to leave the train at Friendship. He balanced in the aisle alone, while the few occupants of the car sat without speaking--men dozing, children padding on the panes, a woman twisting her thin hair tight and high. Doctor June looked at those nearest to be sure of their tired self-absorption, but as for me, who sat very near, I think he had long ago decided that I kept my own thoughts and no others, since sometimes I had forgotten to give him back a greeting. So it was in a fancied security which I was loath to be violating, that he opened his great carpet-bag and took out a book to lay on the girl's knee. "Open it," he commanded her. I saw the contour of her face tightened by her swiftly set lips as she complied. "Point your finger," he went on peremptorily. She must have obeyed, for in a kind of unwilling eagerness she bent over the page, and the doctor stooped, and together in the blurring light of the kerosene lamp in the roof of the coach they made out something. "... the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things ..." I unwillingly caught, and yet not wholly unwillingly either. And though I watched, as if much depended upon it, the great motor-car of the Proudfits vanishing before us into the dark, I could not forbear to glance at the doctor, who was nodding, his kind face quickening. But the girl lifted her eyes and laughed with deliberate scepticism. "I don't take any stock," she said, and within me it was as if something answered to her bitterness. "No--no. Mebbe not," Doctor June commented with perfect cheerfulness. "Some folks take fresh air, and some folks like to stay shut up tight. But--'the shadow of good things to come.' I'd take that much stock if I was you, Delia." As he laid the book back in his bag, the train was jolting across the switches beside the gas house, and the lights of Friendship were all about the track. "Why don't you get off?" he reiterated, in his tone a descending scale of simple hospitality. "Come to our house and stop a spell. Come for tea," he added; "I happen to know we're goin' to hev hot griddle-cakes an' sausage gravy." She shook her head sharply and in silence. Doctor June stood for a moment meditatively looking down at her. "There's a friend of yours at our house to-day, for all day," he observed. "I ain't any friends," replied the girl, obstinately, "without you mean _use'_ to be. An' I don't know if I had then, either." "Yes. Yes, you have, Delia," said Doctor June, kindly. "He was asking about you last time he was here--kind of indirect." "_Who?_" she demanded, but it was as if something within her wrung the question from her against her will. "Abel Halsey," Doctor June told her, "Abel Halsey. Remember him?" Instead of answering she looked out the window at the Friendship Depot platform, and:-- "Ain't he a big minister in the City?" I barely heard her ask.