his head in alarm and declared that it must be looked into. He called Mary
into his little narrow office in the school building, but lost courage
when she sat before him, and said nothing. The man in the barber shop, who
repeated the tale, said that the real estate man drove on to a distant
station and took a train to the city, and that some days later he came
back to Caxton and moved his family out of town.

Sam dismissed the story from his mind. Having begun a friendship for Mary
he put the man in the barber shop into a class with Windy McPherson and
thought of him as a pretender and liar who talked for the sake of talk. He
remembered with a shock the crude levity with which the loafers in the
shop had greeted the repetition of the tale. Their comments had come back
to his mind as he walked through the streets with his newspapers and had
given him a kind of jolt. He went along under the trees thinking of the
sunlight falling upon the grey hair as they walked together on summer
afternoons, and bit his lip and opened and closed his fist convulsively.

During Mary's second year in the Caxton schools her mother died, and at
the end of another year, her father, failing in the harness business, Mary
became a fixture in the schools. The house at the edge of the town, the
property of her mother, had come down to her and she lived there with an
old aunt. After the passing of the wind of scandal concerning the real
estate man the town lost interest in her. She was thirty-six at the time
of her first friendship with Sam and lived alone among her books.

Sam had been deeply moved by her friendship. It had seemed to him
something significant that grown people with affairs of their own should
be so in earnest about his future as she and Telfer were. Boylike, he
counted it a tribute to himself rather than to the winsome youth in him,
and was made proud by it. Having no real feeling for books, and only