right enough, but they seemed to stand forth with a
novel prominence. Upon a second glance, he saw that the board had been
repainted. At this he laughed aloud. The details of the episode came
back to him now. For some reason, or no reason at all--he could not now
imagine what on earth could have prompted him--he had last spring caused
his sister to be informed of his wish that her own name, Dabney, should
be substituted for that of Thorpe on her sign. It was to Julia that he
had confided this mission, and it was Julia who, in a round-about
way, had disclosed to him presently her mother's deep resolution to do
nothing of the sort. He laughed again at the added defiance that this
refurbishing of the old sign expressed, and still was grinning broadly
as he entered the shop and pushed his way along to the rear.

She stood beside her desk as she seemed to have stood ever since he
could remember her--tall, placid, dull-eyed, self-sufficient, exhaling
as it were a kind of stubborn yet competent listlessness. Her long,
mannish countenance expressed an undoubted interest in his presence,
when she recognized him, but he had no clear perception whether it was
pleased or otherwise. In their infrequent latter-day encounters he had
dropped the habit of kissing her, and there was certainly no hint in
her manner of expecting, much less inviting, its renewal now--but upon
a sudden impulse he drew her to him with an arm flung round her gaunt
waist, smacked his lips with effusion upon her cheek.

Her surprise, as she withdrew herself somewhat forcefully from his
embrace, was plain enough. "Well!" she exclaimed vaguely, and then
looked at him. "You're getting fatter."

"No I'm not," he rejoined, with the earnestness belonging to an
important topic. "People think I am--but it's merely the looseness of
these clothes. There's really no difference since I was here last."

The glance they exchanged was so full of the tacit comment that this
last visit was a long time ago, that Thorpe put it into words. "Let's
see--that was just before Christmas, wasn't it?" he said.

"Something like that," she responded. "You were going to get married
in a week or two, I remember, and THAT was in January, wasn't it? I was
taking stock, I know."

He nodded in turn. The thought that his only sister recalled his
marriage merely as a date, like a royal anniversary or a bank-holiday,
and held herself implacably aloof from all contact with his domestic
life, an