“I remember you thought of doing graduate work along scientific lines.  Did you give that up?”

“Yes.  I found father needed me at home; his health must have been failing even then, though I didn’t realize it.  I’ve been in the store with him ever since.  I’m glad I have—­now.”

“It’s not been good for you,” declared Richard, scrutinizing his friend’s pale and rather worn face critically.  It would have seemed to him still paler and more worn if he could have seen it in contrast with his own fresh-tinted features, ruddy with his morning’s drive.  “Better come with me for an afternoon spin farther up State, and a good dinner at a place I know.  Get you back by bedtime.”

“There’s nothing I’d like better, Rich,” said Benson longingly; “but—­I can’t leave the store.  I have rather a short force of clerks—­and on a sunny day—­”

“You’d sell more goods to-morrow,” urged Richard, feeling increasingly anxious to do something which might bring light into a face he had not remembered as so sombre.

But Benson shook his head again.  Afterward, in front of the store to which the two had returned in the car, Richard could only give his friend a warm grip of the hand and an urgent invitation to visit him in the city.

“I suppose you come down often to buy goods,” he suggested.  “Or do you send buyers?  I don’t know much about the conduct of business in a town like this—­or much about it at home, for that matter,” he owned.  “Though I’m not sure I’m proud of my ignorance.”

“It doesn’t matter whether you know anything about it or not, of course,” said Benson, looking up at him with a queer expression of wistfulness.  “No, I’m my own buyer.  And I don’t buy of a great, high-grade firm like yours; I go to a different class of fellows for my stuff.”

Richard drove on, thinking hard about Benson.  What a pity for a fellow of twenty-six or seven to look like that, careworn and weary.  He wondered whether it was the loss of his father and the probably sorrowful atmosphere at home that accounted for the look in Benson’s eyes, or whether his business was not a particularly successful one.  He recalled that the one careless glance he had given the windows of Benson’s store had brought to his mind the fleeting impression that village shopkeepers had not much art in the dressing of their windows as a means of alluring the public.

As he drove on he felt in his pockets for a cigar and found his case unexpectedly empty.  He turned back to a drugstore, went in and supplied himself from the best in stock—­none too good for his fastidious taste.

“What’s your best dry-goods shop here?” he inquired casually.

“Artwell & Chatford’s the best—­now,” responded the druggist, glancing across the street, where a sign bearing those names met the eye.  “Chaffee Brothers has run ’em a close second since Benson’s dropped out of the competition.  Benson’s used to be the best, but it’s fallen way behind.  Look at Artwell’s window display over there and see the reason,” he added, pointing across the street with the citizen’s pride in a successful enterprise in no way his own rival.