"It was a year before he came back. People had already begun to talk about the way his father had gone before him--he shot himself, Mr. O'Mara, when he became tired of waiting for Garry's mother to return--and when Garry reappeared they talked more. I never knew before that a change so terrible could take place in anyone so much a man as I know Garry to be. It's not just his face and his rather dreadful silence. It's not the fact alone that he drinks too much, and shows it, pitifully. It's--oh, it's the pity that a brain so keen could so deliberately commit suicide. "They've begun to drop him, Mr. O'Mara, and you know what that means. But I'll always care for him deeply. That's why I have asked him up this fall. Don't you think you could come down again, Friday, if you have to go back into the woods before then? I'm going to have a party for some week-end guests--a masque dance. Garry needs his friends now, more than he ever did, and--and when you meet him will you--will you, please, not let him see that you notice how much he has changed?" Barbara put one hand upon his elbow, and again in that moment of contact the directness of her appeal made Steve think of a slim and clear-eyed boy. He realized that she cared for Garrett Devereau only as he cared himself with fine and lasting appreciation for the finenesses of him whom they had known together. Steve nodded his comprehension, and made no answer to her invitation to him, then. But they found conversation somehow less easy after that. It was not until they had traversed the streets of the lower village--long lanes of red and blue and saffron-fronted saloon-hotels and rivermen's lodging-houses--and reached the newer, huger mills down-river that the girl regained in part her former vivacity. Morrison had grown, inconceivably, in those elapsed years. A railroad station and freight-yard occupied the ground which had been occupied by the former mills; a single track road stretched arrow-straight into the south to a junction with the trunk line, which swung westward twenty odd miles below. And even the very atmosphere of that lower portion of the town was different. The men still swarmed in on the drives, brilliant dots of color against the neutral background of the dusty wide streets. Their capacity for abandonment to pleasure, their prodigality, was as great as ever, but the old-time picturesque simplicity of it all seemed lacking--the simplicity which had once mitigated much that would have been otherwise only brutish. The dingily gaudy saloon fronts, like drabs in blowsy finery, struck a too sophisticated, sinister note--which, after all, only sums up completely the change which had taken place. Even the vices of the older Morrison, in being systematized, had become infinitely more complicated, too. It was no longer a river village. Morrison was a city now.