As he sauntered one street of homely homes redeemed by the opulence of their foliage, he saw coming his way a woman whose outlines seemed but the enlargement of some photograph in the gallery of remembrance. Before she reached him he identified Phoebe Carew. Her mother, he remembered, had been widowed early and had eked out a meager income by making chocolate fudge, which the little girl peddled about town on Saturday afternoons. And now the child, though she must be thirty or thereabouts, had kept a certain grace of her youth, a wistful prettiness, a girlish unmarriedness, that marked her as an old maid by accident or choice, not by nature's decree. He wondered if she, at least, would pay him the compliment of recognition. She made no sign of it as she approached. As she passed he lifted his hat. "Isn't this Miss Phoebe Carew?" Wakefield women were not in danger from strangers' advances; she paused without alarm and answered with an inquiring smile: "Yes." "You don't remember me?" She studied him. "I seem to, and yet--" "I'm Luke Shelby." "Luke Shelby! Oh yes! Why, how do you do?" She gave him her beautiful hand, but she evidently lacked the faintest inkling of his identity. Time had erased from recollection the boy who used to take her sliding on his sled, the boy who used to put on her skates for her, the boy who used to take her home on his grocery-wagon sometimes, pretending that he was going her way, just for the benizon of her radiant companionship, her shy laughter. "I used to live here," he said, ashamed to be so forgettable. "My mother was--my stepfather was A. J. Stacom, who kept the hardware-store." "Oh yes," she said; "they moved away some years ago, didn't they?" "Yes; after mother died my stepfather went back to Council Bluffs, where we came from in the first place. I used to go to school with you, Phoebe--er--Miss Carew. Then I drove Spate's delivery-wagon for a while before I went East." "Oh yes," she said; "I think I remember you very well. I'm very glad to see you again, Mr.--Mr. Stacom." "Shelby," he said, and he was so heartsick that he merely lifted his hat and added, "I'm glad to see you looking so well." "You're looking well, too," she said, and smiled the gracious, empty smile one visits on a polite stranger. Then she went her way. In his lonely eyes she moved with a goddess-like grace that made clouds of the uneven pavements where he stumbled as he walked with reverted gaze. He went back to the hotel lonelier than before, in a greater loneliness than Ulysses felt ending his Odyssey in Ithaca. For, at least, Ulysses was remembered by an old dog that licked his hand. Once in his room, Shelby sank into a patent rocker of most uncomfortable plush. The inhospitable garishness of a small-town hotel's luxury expelled him from the hateful place, and he resumed the streets, taking, as always, determination from rebuff and vowing within himself: