But if one looked closely into this face, here in the snowlight of the November afternoon, there would be found sundry lines and shadows of sensibility and of suffering which were at war with its general expression. And these, when one caught them, had an air of being new, and of not yet having had time to lay definite hold upon the face itself. They were nearer it now, perhaps, as the tears came, than they had often been before, yet even now both they and the moisture glistening on the long lashes, appeared foreign to the calm immobility of the countenance. Tears did not seem to belong there, nor smiles. Yet a real smile did all at once move to softness the compressed lines of her lips, and bring color to her cheeks and a pleasant mellowing of glance into her eyes. She had been striving to occupy her all-too-introspective mind by reading the signs with which the house-fronts were thickly covered; and here, on a doorway close beside her, was one at sight of which her whole face brightened. And it was a charming face now--a face to remember--with intelligence and fine feeling and frank happiness in every lineament, yet with the same curious suggestion, too, of the smile, like the tears, being rare and unfamiliar. The sign was a small sheet of tin, painted in yellow letters on a black ground: REUBEN TRACY, Attorney and Counsellor at Law, Second Floor. “Oh, he is here, then; he has come back!” she said aloud. She repeated, with an air of enjoying the sound of the words: “He has come back.” She walked up to the sign, read it over and over again, and even touched it, in a meditative way, with the tip of her gloved finger. The smile came to her face once more as she murmured: “_He_ will know--he will make it easier for me.” But even as she spoke the sad look spread over her face again. She walked back to the place where she had been standing, and looked resolutely away from the sign--at the tipped-over load of hay, at the engine-house, at the sleighs passing to and fro--through eyes dimmed afresh with tears. Thus she still stood when her father returned. The expressman who halted his bob-sleigh at the cutting in front of her, and who sat holding the reins while her father piled her valise and parcels on behind, looked her over with a half-awed, half-quizzical glance, and seemed a long time making up his mind to speak. Finally he said: “How d’do? Want to ride here, on the seat, longside of me?” There was an indefinable something in his tone, and in the grin that went with it, which she resented quickly. “I had no idea of riding at all,” she made answer. Her father, who had seated himself on a trunk in the centre of the sleigh, interposed. “Why, Jess, you remember Steve, don’t you?” he asked, apologetically. The expressman and the girl looked briefly at one another, and nodded in a perfunctory manner.