For a moment he stood silent beside the table. Then with a cry of utter heartbreak, he sank to his knees and permitted the bereaved boy to give vent to his long-repressed agony in a saving flood of tears. When they left the office together, there had been welded a friendship that was stronger than years of any other understanding could have given. Flossy went back to the cottage, and, like the brave helpmeet of such a man as Ellis Hinton must have been, did not sadden the days with her grief. Sometimes, in the little arbor, with J. W. playing at her feet, she sang softly over her sewing: "Beautiful isle of Somewhere, Isle of the true, where we live anew, Beautiful isle of Somewhere." It was her advice that caused the boys to fit up a bedroom and living-room on the second floor of the office. It was her idea that separated Bill from the unsteady air of his home. The Judge, heeding the scriptural injunction implied in the immortal words of Moses, "It is not good that man should be alone," had taken unto himself a fourth wife, and Bill had so many rows with his latest stepmother that there was no opposition to the change. Tom Granger observed that it had been so many matrimonial moons since Bill had a mother that he did not know whether he had any real kinfolks at all. It was certain that he knew little of the real meaning of the word "home." Flossy boarded them, and her cottage was their haven of refuge during many a long evening. It was sad comfort, and yet it was the surest comfort, to have her live over again those last days in the mountains, when Ellis's thoughts bridged space and visualized the rebuilding of Bloomtown. Perhaps Flossy sensed the fact that these evenings were bone and sinew to Jap's manhood. The boy, never careless, was changing to a man of purpose, such as would be the product of Ellis Hinton's training. The stray, born of the union of purposeless, useless Jacky Herron, and Mary, peevish and fretful, changeable and inconstant, had been born again into the likeness of the man who bad been almost a demigod to him. The town was growing, as Ellis had prophesied, and was creeping in three directions across the prairie. It incorporated and began to settle into regular lines. Spring street showed but few gaps in the line of cottages that ran almost all the way from the rear of Blanke's drug store to Flossy's home, and another line of modest cottages looked at them from the other side of the street. A new and fashionable residence place was laid out, in the extreme south end of town, as far from the grime and soot of the railroad as possible; but the substantial old families still clung to their ancestral halls in the vicinity of Court House Square. One day in early spring Bill burst into the office, his reporter's pad flapping wildly. His brown eyes danced. "Big doings!" he shouted. "Pap's going to run for mayor, and he wants the _Herald_ to voice the cry of the town for his services."