Miss Julia had seen that very day.

Cowles hastened away from the door after he had thrown back the
bolts--the bolts and bars which had been laughed at by love all this
time. The young man came out into the stone-floored hall where Anne
Oglesby stood waiting for him--all beautiful and fresh and clean and
sweet--fragrant as a very flower in her worthiness for love.

"Don!" she said, and held out her arms, running toward him.

"Oh, Anne! Anne!"

His arms went about her. And this time there was no one there to see.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE SACKCLOTH OF SPRING VALLEY

Number five roared eastward through the town that day on time. No one
stepped down from the train, and no one took passage on it. Spring
Valley had dropped back into its customary uneventfulness so far as the
outer world might tell. It was but a little hamlet on the long line of
fields and trees that lies along the way of Number Five.

Hurrying on toward the vast confusion of the metropolis, Number Five
gave up its tenants to be lost in the cosmic focus of the great city,
where all about were the lights and the anxious faces. The city, with
its tall, dentated outline against the sky--wonderful, beautiful,
alluring; the city with its unceasing strife, its vast and brooding
peace, where walk side by side the ablest men, the most beautiful women
of all the world, all keyed to the highest pitch of effort, all living
at white heat of emotion and passion, of joy and of sorrow--the city and
its ways--we may not know these unless we, too, embark on Number Five.

In the silk-lined recesses of one of the city's greatest hostelries,
where anything in the world may be bought, there sat, soon after the
arrival of Number Five at the metropolis, the traveling man, Ben McQuaid
of Spring Valley, and a little milliner from a town east of Spring
Valley which Ben McQuaid "made" in his regular travel for his "house."
He had bought for her now the most expensive viands, the most confusing
and inspiring wines that all the city could offer. Soft-footed servants
were attending them both. They were having their little fling. To the
city that was a matter of small consequence.

Nor, when it comes to that, was all the city itself of so much
consequence. The great fact is that, while Ben McQuaid and the little
milliner were speeding east on Number Five, at midday, when the dusty
maples of Spring Valley still were motionless under the heat of the
inland summer day--old Nels J