After this there was no wavering on Helen’s part. She ate, or tried to eat, her early lunch; was very loving to her mother when she said good-bye, and went so far as to kiss Mrs. Taylor, who wondered at her effusiveness, when she was to be gone so short a time. As she passed the office Mark sauntered to the door and said, “Off so soon? Is it time?” “Yes, good-bye,” she answered gayly, while he returned to the papers and accounts he was putting in order for his successor, and feeling pangs of remorse as he thought how Mr. Taylor would miss and mourn for him. Uncle Zacheus went to the station with Helen, and at the last moment when the train was in sight he said to her, “Wall, good-bye. You’ll be comin’ back tomorrer, or I should be sorry, you seem so like our folks.” She grasped his pudgy hand and said, “I can’t begin to tell you how kind you have been to me, or how much I have enjoyed myself at your house. Good-bye.” She pressed his hand to her lips and stepped upon the train, which was soon bearing her away across the meadow lands between the river and the cemetery, where her grandfather’s tall monument was the last thing on which her eyes rested. It was many years before she saw it again. On the platform where she had left him Uncle Zacheus stood, looking at the back of his hand as earnestly as if he could see the kiss Helen had imprinted there. “Wall, I’ll be dumbed,” he soliloquized. “Yes, I will, if this ain’t droll. A young gal like her kissin’ an old codger like me! I wonder what Dot would think of it? I guess I won’t tell her. She mightn’t like it. She hain’t kissed me since I can remember.” If the kiss had been in a tangible form Uncle Zach would have put it away in the hair trunk with Taylor’s Tavern and little Johnny’s blanket. As it was he kept one hand carefully over the spot which Helen’s lips had touched and smoothed it occasionally as he was driven back to the hotel. “Fust rate girl,” he said to Mark, to whom he began to talk of what he was to do in New York. “When you git your business done stay a day or two, if you want to,” he said. “It’s some time sense you was there, and if I’s you I’d call at Miss Tracy’s. They say her home is grand. You know where ’tis?” “Yes,” Mark answered. He could say no more for the lump which was choking him as he kept on with his work. It was harder leaving the old place than he had anticipated, and had Helen been there then and said, “Let’s give it up,” he might have listened to her. Helen was gone. He would not be less courageous than she, and he kept on until every paper and account was labeled and in its place, easy to find and examine. Then he went through the rooms of the hotel one by one, saying good-bye to them, and always with that lump in his throat, making him swallow hard to keep it down. “I am as weak as a woman,” he said to himself, when he went to the stables to say good-bye to the horses.