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Catherine rose. She seemed quite her calm self again. She even smiled. And there was only a slight unsteadiness in her voice when she spoke.

“Oh, no, it isn’t, Stacey!” she said. “You don’t want to stay to dinner with us, but you’re going to, all the same.”

He laughed. “All right,” he assented.

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“I wish,” thought Stacey nervously, when, on the afternoon of the next day but one, his train, slowing down, was passing through the suburbs of Vernon, “I wish that old things would either die outright or else live.”

For there in the distance crept by, on its hill, the Endicott School, where he had gone as a boy; here was a sudden glimpse of the Drive, where he had often motored with Marian. And old emotions stirred feebly within him like ghosts of their dead selves. He did not want them; they annoyed him. They had nothing to do with Stacey Carroll, 1919. They made him conscious of himself, that he had a self.

They were worse than anything he felt at sight of the small crowd which awaited him as the train swept into the station. Amusement submerged all other feelings then.