It was finally settled that Joe should look for work in Danvers, and if he found it, his home should be with the old woman and Cynthy. He did not try to express the joy that surged over and through his heart, that rushed up into his brain, until his head was one mad whirl; but with a firm, quick step and a brave, calm look on his strong face, he went out to take his place in the busy, struggling world--a man among men. Two months passed; months of toil, of anxiety, sometimes of fear; but Joe was so gladdened and comforted by Cynthy's childish love and confidence, that, little by little, he came out of the shadow that had threatened to blacken his life, into the sunshine and peace of a homely, self-sacrificing existence in “Riverside Row.” Cynthy's ideas of heaven were very vague, and not always satisfactory, even to herself, but she often wondered, since Joe came, if heaven ever began here and she was not tasting some of its minor delights. Of course, she did not put it in just this way; but Cynthy's heaven was a place where children walked and were never tired, where above all things they wore pretty clothes and had everything that was denied them on earth. Joe had realized so many of the child's wild dreams, had made possible so many longed-for or unattainable pleasures, had so brightened and changed her weary, painful life, that to Cynthy's eyes there was always about his head a halo as in the pictures of Granny's saints; goodness, kindness, generosity--love, were for her spelled with three letters, and read--Joe. Out of the hard-earned wages the man put into Granny's hand every Saturday night, there was always a little reserved for Cynthy. Her grandmother sometimes fretted or occasionally remonstrated; but Joe was firm. Alas! human life, like the never-resting earth, of which it is a part, swings out of the sunlight into the shadow, out of the daytime into the darkness through which the moon and the stars do not always shine. One night, a bitter, stormy night in November, he was a little late in leaving his work. He had to pass, on his way out of the building, a knot of men who were talking in suppressed voices. They did not ask him to join them, but the words “prison-scab,” “jail-bird”, fell on his ever-alert ear. With a shudder he hurried on.