The same evening Shelby and Phoebe Shelby looked out on their park. The crowds that had used it as a vantage-ground for the pageant had all vanished, leaving behind a litter of rubbish, firecrackers, cigar stubs, broken shrubs, gouged terraces. Not one of them had asked permission, had murmured an apology or a word of thanks. For the first time Phoebe Shelby noted that her husband did not take new determination from rebuff. His resolution no longer made a springboard of resistance. He seemed to lean on her a little. IV The perennially empty cutlery-works gave the Wide-a-Wakefield Club no rest. Year after year the anxiously awaited census renewed the old note of fifteen thousand and denied the eloquent argument of increased population. The committee in its letters continued to refer to Wakefield as "thriving" rather than as "growing." Its ingeniously evasive circulars finally roused a curiosity in Wilmer Barstow, a manufacturer of refrigerators, dissatisfied with the taxes and freight rates of the city of Clayton. Barstow was the more willing to leave Clayton because he had suffered there from that reward which is more unkind than the winter wind. He loved a woman and paid court to her, sending her flowers at every possible excuse and besetting her with gifts. She was not much of a woman--her very lover could see that; but he loved her in his own and her despite. She was unworthy of his jewels as of his infatuation, yet she gave him no courtesy for his gifts. She behaved as if they bored her; yet he knew no other way to win her. The more indifference she showed the more he tried to dazzle her. At last he found that she was paying court herself to a younger man--a selfish good-for-naught who made fun of her as well as of Barstow, and who borrowed money from her as well as from Barstow. When Barstow fully realized that the woman had made him not only her own booby, but the town joke as well, he could not endure her or the place longer. He cast about for an escape. But he found his factory no trifling baggage to move. It was on such fertile soil that one of the Wide-a-Wakefield circulars fell. It chimed so well with Barstow's mood that he decided at least to look the town over. He came unannounced to make his own observations, like the spies sent into Canaan. The trolley-car that met his train was rusty, paintless, forlorn, untenanted. He took a ramshackle hack to the best hotel. Its sign-board bore this legend: "The Palace, formerly Shelby House--entirely new management." He saw his baggage bestowed and went out to inspect the factory building described to him. The cutlery-works proved smaller than his needs, and it had a weary look. Not far away he found a far larger factory, idle, empty, closed. The sign declared it to be the Wakefield Branch of the Shelby Paradise Powder Company. He knew the prosperity of that firm and wondered why this branch had been abandoned.