This was Reuben Tracy, then! Despite his beard, he seemed scarcely to have aged in face during these last five years; but he looked straighter and stronger, and his bearing had more vigor and firmness than she remembered of him in the days when she was an irregular pupil at the little old Burfield-road school-house, and he was the teacher. She was glad that he looked so hale and healthful. And had her tell-tale face, she wondered, revealed as she passed him all the deep pleasure she felt at seeing him again--at knowing he was near? She tried to recall whether she had smiled, and could not make sure. But _he_ had smiled--of that there was not a doubt; and he had known her on the instant, and had taken off his hat, not merely jerked his finger toward it. Ah, what delight there was in these thoughts! She turned to her father, and lifting her voice above the jingle of the bell, spoke with animation: “Tell me about the second man we just, passed--Mr. Tracy. Has he been in Thessaly long, and is he doing a good business?” She added hastily, as if to forestall some possible misconception: “He used to be my school-teacher, you know.” “Guess he’s gettin’ on all right,” replied Lawton: “I hain’t heard nothin’ to the contrary. He must a’ been back from New York along about a year--maybe two.” To her great annoyance he shouted out to the driver: “Steve, how long’s Rube Tracy been back in Thessaly? You keep track o’ things better’n I do.” The expressman replied over his shoulder: “Should say about a year come Christmas.” Then, after a moment’s pause, he transferred the reins to his other hand, twisted himself half around on his seat, and looked into Jessica’s face with his earlier and offensive expression of mingled familiarity and diffidence. “He appeared to remember you: took off his hat,” he said. There was an unmistakable leer on his lank countenance as he added: “That other fellow was Hod Boyce, the General’s son, you know--just come back from the old country.” “Yes, I know!” she made answer curtly, and turned away from him. During what remained of the journey she preserved silence, keeping her gaze steadily fixed on the drifted fields beyond the fence in front of her and thinking about these two young men--at first with infinite bitterness and loathing of the one, and then, for a longer time, and with a soft, half-saddened pleasure, of the other. It was passing strange that she should find herself here at all--here in this village which for years at a time she had sworn never to see again. But, when she thought of it, it seemed still more remarkable that at the very outset she should see, walking together, the two men whom memory most distinctly associated with her old life here as a girl. She had supposed them both--her good and her evil genius--to be far away; in all her inchoate specula-tions about how she should meet various people, no idea of encountering either of these had risen in her mind. Yet here they were--and walking together!