Amzi nearly perished with pride. Busy as he was with the remodeling of the old bank, made necessary by the consolidation (he scorned the idea of moving his bank into the Holton property!), he found time to stand on the bank steps and invite comments on "Phil's latest";--there hadn't been a time since Phil was six when her "latest" wasn't a subject of spirited conversation. Phil's own happiness was mitigated somewhat by the fact that "Journey's End" had lately refused two other manuscripts. Still the editor wrote explaining why her stories were not available and urged her to try again. "Stick to the local flavor," he said, "and don't read Stevenson so much. Anybody can write stories about the French Revolution; not many are able to catch the character and life of Main Street." While she pondered this, she resolved to be a poet and sold a jingle to "Life." Kirkwood wired his congratulations from Chicago. He had not fully recovered from the shock of Lois's declaration of her belief in Phil's genius. Reading Phil's sketch over a lonely dinner in a Chicago hotel, he was pricked anew by the consciousness that he had never fully appreciated Phil's qualities. What Lois had said made a difference. He would have chuckled over the Philesque touches in "The Dogs of Main Street" in any circumstances, but he remembered enough of the commencement essay to value her changes, and to note the mark of the file on certain sentences. The thing had form and something akin to style. While he had been counseling Nan Bartlett as to "The Gray Knight," writing that was quite as individual as hers had been done without his guidance under his own roof! In spite of his professional successes, Fate still played pranks with him. Nan had set herself determinedly against the idea of marrying him, and his assurance that Lois had rejected the idea of remarriage, even for Phil's sake, had not shaken her resolution. Lois's return had dimmed the glow of his second romance. And Nan and Rose had gone to call on her--an act whose finality was not wasted on Kirkwood. The authorship of "The Gray Knight of Picardy" was now generally known, and when the Bartletts called on Phil's mother the talk ran naturally upon books and writers; and as Nan would not talk of herself, Phil's ambitions were thoroughly discussed. Phil, knowing that the Bartletts were coming, had discreetly taken herself off. Lois's account of the visit, given before Amzi at the dinner-table, lacked all those emotional elements which Phil had assumed to be inevitable where a man's former wife describes a call from a woman whom that man has been at the point of marrying. Phil had not lost her feeling that the world is a queer place. "They are splendid women, Amzi," Lois declared. "If you don't marry Rose pretty soon, I shall have to take the matter into my own hands." "Thunder! Rose marry me!" Amzi ejaculated.