he set his precious little home in order, barricaded door and windows,
and set forth for farther fields. He was lucky, as he had been from the
start. He found plenty of employment, and slept comfortably enough in
barns, and now and then in the open. He had traveled by slow stages for
several weeks before he entered a village whose familiar look gave him
a shock. It was not his native village, but near it. In his younger life
he had often journeyed there. It was a little shopping emporium, almost
a city. He recognized building after building. Now and then he thought
he saw a face which he had once known, and he was thankful that there
was hardly any possibility of any one recognizing him. He had grown
gaunt and thin since those far-off days; he wore a beard, grizzled, as
was his hair. In those days he had not been an umbrella man. Sometimes
the humor of the situation struck him. What would he have said, he the
spruce, plump, head-in-the-air young man, if anybody had told him that
it would come to pass that he would be an umbrella man lurking humbly in
search of a job around the back doors of houses? He would laugh softly
to himself as he trudged along, and the laugh would be without the
slightest bitterness. His lot had been so infinitely worse, and he had
such a happy nature, yielding sweetly to the inevitable, that he saw now
only cause for amusement.

He had been in that vicinity about three weeks when one day he met the
woman. He knew her at once, although she was greatly changed. She had
grown stout, although, poor soul! it seemed as if there had been no
reason for it. She was not unwieldy, but she was stout, and all the
contours of earlier life had disappeared beneath layers of flesh. Her
hair was not gray, but the bright brown had faded, and she wore it
tightly strained back from her seamed forehead, although it was thin.
One had only to look at her hair to realize that she was a woman who
had given up, who no longer cared. She was humbly clad in a blue-cotton
wrapper, she wore a dingy black hat, and she carried a tin pail half
full of raspberries. When the man and woman met they stopped with a sort
of shock, and each changed face grew like the other in its pallor. She
recognized him and he her, but along with that recognition was awakened
a fierce desire to keep it secret. His prison record loomed up before
the man, the woman's past loomed up before her. She had possibly not
been guilty of much, but her life was n