I shall not here recount the events on the farm during the weeks which followed Miss Stella's departure. They did not particularly interest me. My whole psychological make-up had been violently shaken, the centres of attention had been shifted, and I was constantly struggling for a readjustment which did not come. The post-office appealed to me more than the peas, and I laboured harder over my photographs of the sundial beds than over the beds themselves. I sent for a ray filter and a wide-angle lens, spending hours in experiment and covering a plank in front of the south door with printing frames. I had written to her the day after she had departed, but no reply came for a week, and then only a brief little note, telling me it was hot in town and conveying her regards to the roses. I, too, waited a week--though it was hard--and then answered, sending some photographs, one of them a snapshot of a bird on the edge of the bath, one of them of Buster sitting on his hind legs. Again she answered briefly, merrily, conveying her especial regards to Buster, but ending with a plaintive little postscript about the heat. I sat, the evening after this letter arrived, in my big, cool room, with Buster beside me, and thought of her down there in the swelter of town. I wanted to answer her letter, and wanted to answer it tenderly. I was lonely in my great, cool room; I was unspeakably lonely. Suddenly it occurred to me that this was the evening of Class Day. The Yard was full of lanterns, of music, of shimmering dresses, of pretty faces, of young men in mortar boards and gowns. I might have been sitting in the deep window recess of my old room above the Yard, drinking in the scene with the pleasant impersonal wistfulness of an older man in the presence of happy youth. But I wasn't. I was sitting here alone with Buster, thinking of a poor girl in a hot, lonely New York lodging-house. I pulled my pad toward me and wrote her a letter. It read: Dear, Nice Lady: I'm lying here on the rug, my tail quite tired after a hard day's work, looking up in Mr. John's face. His face is kind of glum and his eyes sort of faraway looking. I don't know what's the matter with him. He's been that way nights for two or three weeks now, which makes me sad, too; only he goes to the post-office often, which makes me glad, 'cause I love to walk or to run behind the buggy, and there's a collie pup on the way who is very nice. What do you suppose is the trouble? Sometimes he goes to the brook and sits on a stone by a pool there, while I go wading and get my stummick wet and drippy and cool. I wish you'd come back. I didn't get to know you so awful well, but I liked you, and a house with just one glum, stupid man in it ain't--I mean isn't--very nice, 'specially as Peter's still at school. Schools last awful late up here. I am yours waggishly--