"I don't take any stock," she said, and within me it was as if something
answered to her bitterness.

"No--no. Mebbe not," Doctor June commented with perfect cheerfulness.
"Some folks take fresh air, and some folks like to stay shut up tight.
But--'the shadow of good things to come.' I'd take that much stock if I
was you, Delia."

As he laid the book back in his bag, the train was jolting across the
switches beside the gas house, and the lights of Friendship were all
about the track.

"Why don't you get off?" he reiterated, in his tone a descending scale
of simple hospitality. "Come to our house and stop a spell. Come for
tea," he added; "I happen to know we're goin' to hev hot griddle-cakes
an' sausage gravy."

She shook her head sharply and in silence.

Doctor June stood for a moment meditatively looking down at her.

"There's a friend of yours at our house to-day, for all day," he
observed.

"I ain't any friends," replied the girl, obstinately, "without you mean
_use'_ to be. An' I don't know if I had then, either."

"Yes. Yes, you have, Delia," said Doctor June, kindly. "He was asking
about you last time he was here--kind of indirect."

"_Who?_" she demanded, but it was as if something within her wrung the
question from her against her will.

"Abel Halsey," Doctor June told her, "Abel Halsey. Remember him?"

Instead of answering she looked out the window at the Friendship Depot
platform, and:--

"Ain't he a big minister in the City?" I barely heard her ask.

"No," said Doctor June; "dear me, no. Abel's still gypsyin' it off in
the hills. I expect he's out there by the depot with the busses now,
come to meet me in his buggy. Better let him take us all home to
griddle-cakes, Delia?" he pressed her wistfully.

"I couldn't," she said briefly. And, as he put out his hand silently,
"Don't you let _any_body know't you saw me!" she charged him again.

When he was gone, and the train was slackening in the station, she moved
close to the window. If I had been lonely.... I must have caught a
certain cheer in the look of the station and in the magnificent, cosmic
leisure of the idlers: in Photographer Jimmy Sturgis, in his leather
coat, with one eye shut, stamping a foot and waiting for the mail-bag;
in old Tillie, known up and down the world for her waffles, and
perpetually peering out between shelves of plants and wax fruit set
across the window of the "eating-house"; in Peleg Bemus, wood-cutter,
stumping a