sence
for the less alluring sensation of Hamilton's main street.

An hour or so later Evan sauntered up town. He did not feel exactly
lonesome, there by himself in the Saturday crowds, but rather out of
his environment. It seemed strange to him to have no immediate task on
hand, to have nothing to balance or look up. His mind felt almost
vacant, for want of something to burden it; but the vacant feeling was,
oh, such a relief! Only the weary clerk can understand this thing; he
knows so well what it means to carry a burden with him on a pleasure
trip. "Pleasure" is not the adjective to qualify such a trip, where
trees and flowers are decked with figures and where the mind sees
phantoms of accumulated and accumulating work, waiting, waiting like
Fate. Stories have been told of criminals carrying the body of a
victim around on their backs until they stood on the brink of insanity.
Hundreds of bankboys know what it is to feel the weight of corpse-like
figures on their backs. One cannot get away from the horrible burden,
it clings until the heart is sick and the stomach nauseated. And these
monsters are not victims of the bankclerk's, either; the clerk is their
victim; nor does he in any way merit the unnatural attachment--someone
else digs them out of their graves (the bank "morgue" of accumulated
back-work) for plunder, and saddles them on him.....

Evan's mind felt vacant; that was much better than having it loaded
with worry, worry that could result in nothing but harm to the clerk
and nothing but cold dollars to the bank.

The young ex-banker refreshed himself with a solitary sundae and then
took steps in the direction of a theatre advertising the old drama,
"East Lynne." He bought an economic half-dollar seat and entered while
the orchestra was playing one of the reddest rags out. He had read
"Mrs. Henry Wood's" great book, but he searched his memory in vain for
a clue to the propriety of ragtime as a preface to the story.

A moment before the curtain lifted a girl came into the theatre and was
ushered to a lonesome seat beside Evan. He was, gardener fashion,
watching for his money's worth, and paid no attention to the person
beside him until first intermission, when a squint told him that here
was someone very like Hazel Morton of Mt. Alban. Then he looked fully
into her eyes and held out his hand. She seemed surprised.

"Don't you know me, Miss Morton?"

"Why--I'm afraid--why, yes I do!"

They re