And it was written in his wistful little watery eyes, told by his unconquerable tail, that with all his dog’s heart he yearned to be Somebody’s dog.

So he thought he would try Miss Katherine Wayneworth Jones.

She had a number of errands to do, and he followed her from place to place.

She saw him first when she came out from the hair-dresser’s.  He seemed to have been waiting for her.  His heart was too experienced in being broken for him to dance around her with barks of joy, but he stood a little way off and wigglingly tried to ingratiate himself, his eyes looking love, and the longing for love.

Impulsively Katie stooped down to him.  “Poor little doggie, does he want a pat?”

He fairly crouched to the sidewalk in his thankfulness for the pat, his tail and eyes saying all they could.

Then she saw that he was following her.  “Don’t come with me, doggie,” she said; “please don’t.  You must go home.  You’ll get lost.”

But in her heart Katie knew he would not get lost, for to be so unfortunate as to be lost presupposed being so fortunate as to have a home.  And she knew that he was of the homeless.  But because that was so terrible a thing to face, between him and her she kept up that pretense of a home.

When she came out from the confectioner’s he was waiting for her again, a little braver this time, until Katie mildly stamped her foot and told him to “Go back!”

At the third place she expostulated with him.  “Please, doggie, you’re making me feel so badly.  Won’t you run along and play?”

The hypocrisy of that left a lump in her throat as she turned from him.

When she found him waiting again she said nothing at all, but began talking to Ann about some flowers in a window across the street.

Ann had seemed to dislike the dog.  She would step away when Katie stopped to speak to him and be looking intently at something else, as if trying not to know that there were such things as homeless dogs.

Watts was waiting for them with the station wagon when they had finished their shopping.  After they had gone a little way Katie, in the manner of one doing what she was forced to do, turned around.

He was coming after them.  He had not yet fallen to the ranks of those human and other living creatures too drugged in wretchedness to make a fight for happiness.  Nor was he finding it a sympathetic world in which to fight for happiness.  At that very moment a man crossing the street was giving him a kick.  He yelped and crouched away for an instant, but his eyes told that the real hurt was in the thought of losing sight of the carriage that held Katie Jones.  As he dodged in and out, crouching always before the possible kick, she could read all too clearly how harassed he was with that fear.

They were approaching the bridge.  The guard on the bridge would foil that quest.  He would not permit a forlorn little yellow dog to seek happiness by following members of an officer’s family across the Government bridge.  Probably in the name of law and order he would kick him, as the other man had done; the dog’s bleared little eyes, eyes through which the love longing must look, would cast one last look after the unattainable, and then, another hope gone, another promise unrealized, he would return miserably back to his loveless world, but always—­