He did not know clearly just what he had expected upon his return, but then he had not expected the kind of return that he had experienced. There had been nothing epochal in it. Even his job was waiting for him; it seemed to him even the same routine details. One file of correspondence that he had found upon his desk that first morning had had a singularly familiar look. It would always stick in his memory. First there had been a moment of high anticipation at the station with the taxi-men calling out the names of the hotels, and stretched across Main Street he remembered seeing a large banner flanked with bunting and with "Welcome Home" inscribed thereon. Then he had watched the familiar landmarks as he rolled southward in the street car with an odd little feeling of "Hello, there you are again"; and the Works, looming up in the distance at the end of the line, with its tall brick stack, was a sort of culmination. Not exactly a culmination, either, for he was conscious of a jarring note. Then the oak-panelled lobby, with the time clock, a sombre monitor, took just another grain of carefree satisfaction from the sum total of his feelings; and finally--his desk, and the worn, thumb-edged file! The first letter therein! "Recent shipments castings EE23, G143, F47, and J29 have come to us unannealed. J29 shows fins and sprues; the hole in EE23 is in most cases completely closed; and G143 and F47 are so rough that they will not fit into their respective sockets without machining. Will return same via local freight to-day." That was all. An Homeric welcome into very deep water! Such had been Joe Hooper's homecoming. As for Mary Louise:--well, there had been nothing quite so definite. He had met her at the tea room--there had been one final week of closing after his arrival--and he had not quite made up his mind about her before she had left for Bloomfield, beyond a certain stiffening of fibre, an aloofness that was new, and a business-like air that seemed to say "Come across," that he did not exactly like. But then a week is not a very long time to get down to bed-rock with a person, especially when that person is busy ten hours out of the day and thinking the other fourteen about the ten that have just passed.