In Fort Wayne, before she came to Bidwell, and when she had just graduated from the high school Maud had for a time walked upon the border line of love, had stood for a moment in the very pathway of Cupid’s darts. Near the house where the Wellivers then lived there was a grocery run by an alert erect little man of forty-five, whose wife had died. Maud often went to the store to buy supplies for the Welliver home and one evening she arrived just as the grocer, a man named Hunt, was locking the store for the night. He unlocked the door and let her in. “You won’t mind if I don’t light the lights again,” he said. He explained that the grocerymen of Fort Wayne had made an agreement among themselves that they would sell no goods after seven in the evening. “If I light the lights and people see us in here they will be coming in and wanting to be waited on,” he explained. Maud stood in the uncertain light by a counter while the grocer wrapped her packages. At the back of the store there was a lamp fastened to a bracket on the wall and burning dimly and the soft yellow light fell on her hair and on her white smiling face as the grocer fumbled in the darkness back of the counter and from time to time looked up at her. How beautiful her long pale face in that light! He was stirred and delayed the matter of getting the packages wrapped. “My wife and I were not very happy together but I was happy when I lived alone with my mother,” he thought. He let Maud out at the door, locked it and went along beside her carrying the packages. “I’m going your way,” he said vaguely. He began to speak of his boyhood in a town in Ohio and told of how he had married at the age of twenty-three and had come to Fort Wayne where his wife’s father owned the store that was now his own. He spoke to Maud as to one who knew most of the details of his life. “Well, my wife and her father are both dead and I own the place—I’ve come out all right,” he said. “I wonder why I left my mother. I thought more of her than anyone else in the world but I got married and went away and left her, went away and left her, to live alone until she died,” he said. They came to a corner and he put the packages into Maud’s arms. “You got me started thinking of mother. You’re like her,” he said suddenly and then hurried away. Maud had got into the habit of going to the store, just at closing time in the evening and when she did not come the grocer was upset. He closed the store and, walking to a nearby corner, stood under an awning before a hardware store, also closed for the night, and looked down along the street where Maud lived. Then he took a heavy silver watch from his pocket and looked at it. “Huh!” he exclaimed and went off along another street to his boarding house, stopping several times in the first block to look back. * * * * *