until he
had come near the Pike Mansion that he saw a full recognition in the
eyes of one of the many whom he knew, and who had known him in his
boyhood in the town. A lady, turning a corner, looked up carelessly,
and then half-stopped within a few feet of him, as if startled. Joe's
cheeks went a sudden crimson; for it was the lady of his old dreams.

Seven years had made Mamie Pike only prettier. She had grown into her
young womanhood with an ampleness that had nothing of oversufficiency
in it, nor anywhere a threat that some day there might be too much of
her. Not quite seventeen when he had last seen her, now, at
twenty-four, her amber hair elaborately becoming a plump and regular
face, all of her old charm came over him once more, and it immediately
seemed to him that he saw clearly his real reason for coming back to
Canaan. She had been the Rich-Little-Girl of his child days, the
golden princess playing in the Palace-Grounds, and in his early boyhood
(until he had grown wicked and shabby) he had been sometimes invited to
the Pike Mansion for the games and ice-cream of the daughter of the
house, before her dancing days began. He had gone timidly, not daring
ever to "call" her in "Quaker Meeting" or "Post-office," but watching
her reverently and surreptitiously and continually. She had always
seemed to him the one thing of all the world most rare, most
mysterious, most unapproachable. She had not offered an apparition
less so in those days when he began to come under the suspicion of
Canaan, when the old people began to look upon him hotly, the young
people coldly. His very exclusion wove for him a glamour about her,
and she was more than ever his moon, far, lovely, unattainable, and
brilliant, never to be reached by his lifted arms, but only by his
lifted eyes. Nor had his long absence obliterated that light;
somewhere in his dreams it always had place, shining, perhaps, with a
fainter lustre as the years grew to seven, but never gone altogether.
Now, at last, that he stood in her very presence again, it sprang to
the full flood of its old brilliance--and more!

As she came to her half-stop of surprise, startled, he took his courage
in two hands, and, lifting his hat, stepped to her side.

"You--you remember me?" he stammered.

"Yes," she answered, a little breathlessly.

"Ah, that's kind of you!" he cried, and began to walk on with her,
unconsciously. "I feel like a returned ghost wandering
about--i