Home! Why, this WAS home. The Street seemed to stretch out its arms to him. The ailanthus tree waved in the sunlight before the little house. Tree and house were old; September had touched them. Christine sat sewing on the balcony. A boy with a piece of chalk was writing something on the new cement under the tree. He stood back, head on one side, when he had finished, and inspected his work. K. caught him up from behind, and, swinging him around-- “Hey!” he said severely. “Don't you know better than to write all over the street? What'll I do to you? Give you to a policeman?” “Aw, lemme down, Mr. K.” “You tell the boys that if I find this street scrawled over any more, the picnic's off.” “Aw, Mr. K.!” “I mean it. Go and spend some of that chalk energy of yours in school.” He put the boy down. There was a certain tenderness in his hands, as in his voice, when he dealt with children. All his severity did not conceal it. “Get along with you, Bill. Last bell's rung.” As the boy ran off, K.'s eye fell on what he had written on the cement. At a certain part of his career, the child of such a neighborhood as the Street “cancels” names. It is a part of his birthright. He does it as he whittles his school desk or tries to smoke the long dried fruit of the Indian cigar tree. So K. read in chalk an the smooth street:-- Max Wilson Marriage. Sidney Page Love. [Note: the a, l, s, and n of “Max Wilson” are crossed through, as are the S, d, n, and a of “Sidney Page”] The childish scrawl stared up at him impudently, a sacred thing profaned by the day. K. stood and looked at it. The barytone was still singing; but now it was “I'm twenty-one, and she's eighteen.” It was a cheerful air, as should be the air that had accompanied Johnny Rosenfeld to his long sleep. The light was gone from K.'s face again. After all, the Street meant for him not so much home as it meant Sidney. And now, before very long, that book of his life, like others, would have to be closed. He turned and went heavily into the little house. Christine called to him from her little balcony:-- “I thought I heard your step outside. Have you time to come out?” K. went through the parlor and stood in the long window. His steady eyes looked down at her. “I see very little of you now,” she complained. And, when he did not reply immediately: “Have you made any definite plans, K.?” “I shall do Max's work until he is able to take hold again. After that--” “You will go away?” “I think so. I am getting a good many letters, one way and another. I suppose, now I'm back in harness, I'll stay. My old place is closed. I'd go back there--they want me. But it seems so futile, Christine, to leave as I did, because I felt that I had no right to go on as things were; and now to crawl back on the strength of having had my hand forced, and to take up things again, not knowing that I've a bit more right to do it than when I left!”