She stood and looked down the elm-shaded street, through which the footsteps of her beloved would soon be hastening to her. The department store wagons were still rattling up and down, delivering relays and relays of parcels at the different houses, and here and there weary, draggled-looking women were returning from town, each carrying by one end the large paper bag which contains an untrimmed hat. You could tell by the way they walked that their feet hurt. Down the block the freshening palms and rubber plants were grouped at intervals. On Mrs. Thatcher’s piazza, the emblem of a much-enduring domesticity once more stood in the sunshine, stolid and green. The Terminal The Terminal It was Saturday night—the married “drummer’s” homesick night. Mr. Martin Prescott, walking into the long, narrow hotel bedroom, felt more than ever the wearing familiarity of the scene that met his eye. There were the same dull carpet, the Michigan pine furniture, the drab striped wallpaper, the windows shaded only by little slatted inside shutters, to which he was used in third-rate towns. There was even the same indefinable chill, dusty smell that was associated with evenings of figuring over sales on the coverless table, under the weak, single-armed gas burner that jutted out from the wall at the side of the bureau. Yet, cheerless as it was, he preferred its seclusion just now to the more convivial bar-room, where the liquor and the jokes and the conversation of “the boys” had all the same jading flavour, and he felt unequal to bracing his spirit sufficiently to receiving the Saturday confidences of the garrulous or the weary. Reticent both by habit and principle as to his intimate affairs, he was no stranger to his kind, and in the top strata of his mind were embedded many curious evidences of other men’s lives. But to-night he had a matter on his mind that companied him whether he would or no, and he was sore at having to stay over in this little town, from which there was egress once only in twenty-four hours. He had waited for a customer who did not arrive in the place until too late for him to get out of it, and had hereby missed the letter from his wife which was waiting for him some hundred miles further westward. Prescott did not, in a way, dislike travelling as a business; his wife always comforted herself with the thought that there were other modes of earning a living more inherently disagreeable to him, yet there were days and nights of a paucity which he was glad she could not picture. Saturday night away from home in this kind of a town, without a letter—when the last one had been disquieting—reached the limit of endurance. He felt that he had travelled long enough.