ness in her master, but if he were going crazy all of a sudden,
why that would be a different matter altogether. So presently she was
confiding to her spiritual adviser.

Mr. Stackpole returned to the porch and sat down again and waited for
what was to be. Through the heat of the waning afternoon Clay Street was
almost deserted; but toward sunset the thickening tides of pedestrian
travel began flowing by his house as men returned homeward from work. He
had a bowing acquaintance with most of those who passed.

Two or three elderly men and women among them he had known fairly well
in years past. But no single one of those who came along turned in at
his gate to offer him the congratulation he so eagerly desired; no
single one, at sight of him, all poised and expectant, paused to call
out kindly words across the palings of his fence. Yet they must have
heard the news. He knew that they had heard it--all of them--knew it by
the stares they cast toward the house front as they went by. There was
more, though, in the staring than a quickened interest or a sharpened
curiosity.

Was he wrong, or was there also a sort of subtle resentment in it? Was
there a sense vaguely conveyed that even these old acquaintances of his
felt almost personally aggrieved that a town character should have
ceased thus abruptly to be a town character--that they somehow felt a
subtle injustice had been done to public opinion, an affront offered to
civic tradition, through this unexpected sloughing off by him of the
role he for so long had worn?

He was not wrong. There was an essence of a floating, formless
resentment there. Over the invisible tendons of mental telepathy it came
to him, registering emphatically.

As he shrank back in his chair he summoned his philosophy to give him
balm and consolation for his disappointment. It would take time, of
course, for people to grow accustomed to the change in him--that was
only natural. In a few days, now, when the shock of the sensation had
worn off, things would be different. They would forgive him for breaking
a sort of unuttered communal law, but one hallowed, as it were, by rote
and custom. He vaguely comprehended that there might be such a law for
his case--a canon of procedure which, unnatural in itself, had come with
the passage of the passing years to be quite naturally accepted.

Well, perhaps the man who broke such a law, even though it were
originally of his own fashioning, must abide the co