et events not unconnected with William's
passion caused her to think of Mr. Parcher more poignantly than ever;
nor was her mind diverted to a different channel by another confidential
conversation with her mother. Who can say, then, that it was not by
design that she came face to face with Mr. Parcher on the public highway
at about five o'clock that afternoon? Everything urges the belief that
she deliberately set herself in his path.

Mr. Parcher was walking home from his office, and he walked slowly,
gulping from time to time, as he thought of the inevitable evening
before him. His was not a rugged constitution, and for the last
fortnight or so he had feared that it was giving way altogether. Each
evening he felt that he was growing weaker, and sometimes he thought
piteously that he might go away for a while. He did not much care where,
though what appealed to him most, curiously enough, was not the thought
of the country, with the flowers and little birds; no, what allured him
was the idea that perhaps he could find lodgment for a time in an Old
People's Home, where the minimum age for inmates was about eighty.

Walking more and more slowly, as he approached the dwelling he had once
thought of as home, he became aware of a little girl in a checkered
dress approaching him at a gait varied by the indifferent behavior of
a barrel-hoop which she was disciplining with a stick held in her
right hand. When the hoop behaved well, she came ahead rapidly; when it
affected to be intoxicated, which was most often its whim, she zigzagged
with it, and gained little ground. But all the while, and without
reference to what went on concerning the hoop, she slowly and
continuously fed herself (with her left hand) small, solemnly relished
bites of a slice of bread-and-butter covered with apple sauce and
powdered sugar.

Mr. Parcher looked upon her, and he shivered slightly; for he knew her
to be Willie Baxter's sister.

Unaware of the emotion she produced in him, Jane checked her hoop and
halted.

"G'd afternoon, Mister Parcher," she said, gravely.

"Good afternoon," he returned, without much spirit.

Jane looked up at him trustfully and with a strange, unconscious
fondness. "You goin' home now, Mr. Parcher?" she asked, turning to
walk at his side. She had suspended the hoop over her left arm and
transferred the bread-and-butter and apple sauce and sugar to her right,
so that she could eat even more conveniently than before.