'fix' the head office
travel-slip."

"What's that?" asked Evan.

Mr. Robb showed him a slip of paper to be signed by the manager of the
branch left and the branch arrived at, also by the transient clerk.
This slip records the time to a minute and allows no stop-over or
visits en route. Neither does it permit of delay in leaving.

Evan suddenly decided he would not bother going home. He explained to
Watson later that he considered it crooked to tamper with the
travel-slip and thought he would be a cad to let the manager run the
chance of further incurring head office displeasure by altering it.

"By heck," said Bill, "you've got to let some of that good conscience
run out if you ever expect to stay in the bank."

"Well, Bill," was the reply, "when I find that I can't be honest in the
bank I'll get out of it."

Watson remembered that remark years afterwards.

Evan wrote letters home, one to his mother and one to Frankie Arling.
Then he packed his trunk and bade good-bye to Mt. Alban. Within four
hours after receiving notice from head office he was on the train bound
for Creek Bend.

Mrs. Nelson cried over her son's letter, and went to her husband for
consolation.

"Carrie," he said, "it will do the boy good."

"But why didn't they let him say good-bye to us?" she cried.

"Well," answered George Nelson, "business is business, you know."

In his store-office the father used profanity. Men swear. He voiced a
wish that all banks were made of sand and situated in the neighborhood
of Newfoundland.

Frankie swallowed something in her throat as she read her letter.
There was one grain of comfort in it, though, prompting the utterance:

"That ends Julia!"

CHAPTER VI.

_THE VILLAGE MAIDEN._

Months had passed. Western Ontario was turning brown; heaps of leaves
had already fallen. The village of Creek Bend was sleeping through the
Indian Summer day. So was Evan Nelson--he lay sprawled on a hammock
swung between two apple-trees behind the bank.

It is not to be inferred, however, that Evan was lazy, or that he had
spent the summer lazily. Every morning before seven he had been out
for a three-mile run, and every evening it had been football with the
village team or a ride on the bicycle. He knew that physical exercise
was necessary to health, and he took it as regularly as his mother used
to make him take a spring tonic.

The work of the Creek Bend branch was ludicrously light. The manager