The girl might no longer honestly complain of Nelson's lack of purpose. He had "struck his gait" it seemed; it was as though he had suddenly seen a mark before him and was pressing onward to that goal at top speed. When he and Janice met as they did, of course, at church and occasionally at evening parties, the teacher and the girl were the very best of friends But tête-à-têtes were barred. Was it by Janice herself? Or had Nelson deliberately changed his attitude toward her? Sometimes she tried to unravel this mystery; but then, before she had gone far in her ruminations, she began to wonder if she _wanted_ Nelson to change toward her? That question frightened her, and she would at once refuse to face the situation at all! Once Nelson told her that a small college in middle Massachusetts offered a line of work that he believed he would like to take up--if he was "doomed to the profession of teaching, after all." "And does the doom seem so very terrible?" she asked him, laughingly. "I admit that I can _do_ things with the scholars," he said, gravely. "I have just begun to realize it. It seems easy for me to make them understand. But the profession doesn't give one the freedom that the law does, for instance." Janice had made no further comment, nor did Nelson advance anything more regarding the work offered by the college in question. She had her own intense interests, now and then. Clean-Up Day was past but its effect in Poketown was ineradicable. Janice was satisfied that there were enough people finally awake in the town to surely, if slowly, revolutionize the place. How could one householder drop back into the old, shiftless, careless manner of living when his neighbors' places on either hand were so trim? The carelessly-kept shop showed up a hundred per cent. worse than it had before Clean-Up Day. Even old Bill Jones kept in some trim, and the meat markets began to rival each other in cleanliness. The taxpayers began to speak with pride of Poketown. When they visited Middletown, or other villages that had previously looked down on the hillside hamlet above the lake, they were apt to say: "Just come over and see our town. What? You ain't been in Poketown in two years? No wonder you don't know what you're talking about! Why, we put it all over you fellows here for clean streets, and shops, and nice-lookin' lawns and all that--and our school!" Poketownites were proud of the reading-room, too, although Mr. Massey's store was becoming a cramped place for it now. The shelves devoted to the circulating library were well crowded. The state appropriation had been spent carefully, and the new, well-bound books looked "mighty handsome" when visitors came into the place.