So that last walk of Nathan’s and mine ended by making a trip to the Spring Street house; my friend had a little hunch that he would like to see if those letters were still hidden there and read them over again, because of what they had once stood for in his precocious young life. A family by the name of Bailey had bought the Spring Street place and grudgingly gave consent for us to search the garret. Nathan found the packet, laid there on the mellow, brown rafters in the dark through sixteen years and smelling acridly of dried plaster, dank soot and moist creosote from the near-by kitchen chimney. After dinner that night, as we smoked our pipes, Nathan opened them,—a packet of boy-and-girl love notes faded with the flight of time and bringing back the joys of Long Ago. Scrawled sheets where “he was mad” and “she was mad” and he had spoken to some other little girl yesterday, and she had permitted Sammy Sargent to walk home from school with her and carry her books. There were dozens of them. And though Nathan smiled at the “till-death-do-us-part” endings, I knew they were vibrating raw heart chords. Excoriations of Nathan’s dad, intrigues for him to “skin out” and go with her to parties, little petulant fault findings, all were very sweet now, misty, as those years had become with the nebulous glow of Boyhood Romance. “Bill,” said my friend finally, “I’ve got a hunch I’ll call off in Chicago and look Bernie up. I might return these letters to her as an excuse for seeing her, if nothing else. I’d like to talk over old times with Bernie, even if I was a mushy young calf. Yes, I’ll stop off in Chicago and look Bernie up. After all, a man rarely forgets his first love, never mind how many follow.” We mentioned Milly only once in our talk that last night. She had disappeared from town immediately and so had Plumb. “It was all my mistake—marrying her in the first place, Bill,” he said. “I had brains enough to know better but not the common sense to exercise them. And I was lonely—God, how lonely! Poor Milly! After all, _she_ was more sinned against than sinning.” He went away on the same train next forenoon on which Carol Gardner had left our homely little railroad station, nine years before. Only it wasn’t raining the morning Nathan left. The sun was shining—shining gloriously—bright and warm. I was too deeply concerned with bidding my friend good-by, however, to attach much significance to the sunshine. So we parted—for War! Old Caleb Gridley’s train reached Paris at twelve o’clock. He missed bidding Nat farewell by an hour. II