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shabby room filled with a faint loneliness and despondency. He wondered again about Mr. Ditmas and the five hundred dollars; whether he had done right in refusing the money. This theme barely bordered his thoughts and drifted away again. The motif which persisted was Tug Beavers going to see the Meredith girl. Why this should persist, why it should fill him with this faint undefined melancholy, Abner had not the least idea. Nevertheless, it did.

Abner arose, raised the torn red window shade which Tug had lowered when he took his bath, and then sat down on the edge of his bed looking out over the shabby village street. The hardness, the dirtiness of the scene recalled the soft vistas of the poorhouse farm. At about this time Beatrice Belle would start after the cows. He thought wistfully of the Sandages; then he recalled Railroad Jones; then Squire Meredith again. He remembered with a certain sharpness that the Squire had said Nessie Sutton lived in Irontown. This fact apparently had been the magnetic centre about which revolved the vague whorl of his mood. Nessie Sutton lived in Irontown. He looked out the window with an irrational feeling that he ought to see her. But the stores still faced him with their tobacco signs, with a few ancient circus posters weathering from their sides; with a loiterer or two moving across the lumpy street; and it seemed to Abner that he had come to where Nessie Sutton lived, and she had faded into thin air. He would never see her again. And that was the poignant thing hidden in tying Tug Beavers's tie and sending him off to see the Meredith girl—it was the vanished Nessie Sutton.

Abner drew a deep breath, stretched out his legs, jumped over, and stared fixedly into the squalid street. At that moment a voice below at the Scovell House gate called his name. An absurd hope twitched through him that it was Nessie Sutton herself who, in walking past, had seen him in the window. He thrust his head out hurriedly and looked down. Leaning against the gate under the hotel sign stood the tall angular form of Zed Parrum.