Seven years had made Mamie Pike only prettier. She had grown into her young womanhood with an ampleness that had nothing of oversufficiency in it, nor anywhere a threat that some day there might be too much of her. Not quite seventeen when he had last seen her, now, at twenty-four, her amber hair elaborately becoming a plump and regular face, all of her old charm came over him once more, and it immediately seemed to him that he saw clearly his real reason for coming back to Canaan. She had been the Rich-Little-Girl of his child days, the golden princess playing in the Palace-Grounds, and in his early boyhood (until he had grown wicked and shabby) he had been sometimes invited to the Pike Mansion for the games and ice-cream of the daughter of the house, before her dancing days began. He had gone timidly, not daring ever to "call" her in "Quaker Meeting" or "Post-office," but watching her reverently and surreptitiously and continually. She had always seemed to him the one thing of all the world most rare, most mysterious, most unapproachable. She had not offered an apparition less so in those days when he began to come under the suspicion of Canaan, when the old people began to look upon him hotly, the young people coldly. His very exclusion wove for him a glamour about her, and she was more than ever his moon, far, lovely, unattainable, and brilliant, never to be reached by his lifted arms, but only by his lifted eyes. Nor had his long absence obliterated that light; somewhere in his dreams it always had place, shining, perhaps, with a fainter lustre as the years grew to seven, but never gone altogether. Now, at last, that he stood in her very presence again, it sprang to the full flood of its old brilliance--and more! As she came to her half-stop of surprise, startled, he took his courage in two hands, and, lifting his hat, stepped to her side. "You--you remember me?" he stammered. "Yes," she answered, a little breathlessly. "Ah, that's kind of you!" he cried, and began to walk on with her, unconsciously. "I feel like a returned ghost wandering about--invisible and unrecognized. So few people seem to remember me!" "I think you are wrong. I think you'll find everybody remembers you," she responded, uneasily. "No, I'm afraid not," he began. "I--" "I'm afraid they do!" Joe laughed a little. "My father was saying something like that to me a while ago. He meant that they used to think me a great scapegrace here. Do you mean that?" "I'd scarcely like to say," she answered, her face growing more troubled; for they were close on the imperial domain. "But it's long ago--and I really didn't do anything so outrageous, it seems to me." He laughed again. "I know your father was angry with me once or twice, especially the night I hid on your porch to watch you--to watch you dance, I mean. But, you see, I've come back to rehabilitate myself, to--"