Mr. Parcher was walking home from his office, and he walked slowly, gulping from time to time, as he thought of the inevitable evening before him.  His was not a rugged constitution, and for the last fortnight or so he had feared that it was giving way altogether.  Each evening he felt that he was growing weaker, and sometimes he thought piteously that he might go away for a while.  He did not much care where, though what appealed to him most, curiously enough, was not the thought of the country, with the flowers and little birds; no, what allured him was the idea that perhaps he could find lodgment for a time in an Old People’s Home, where the minimum age for inmates was about eighty.

Walking more and more slowly, as he approached the dwelling he had once thought of as home, he became aware of a little girl in a checkered dress approaching him at a gait varied by the indifferent behavior of a barrel-hoop which she was disciplining with a stick held in her right hand.  When the hoop behaved well, she came ahead rapidly; when it affected to be intoxicated, which was most often its whim, she zigzagged with it, and gained little ground.  But all the while, and without reference to what went on concerning the hoop, she slowly and continuously fed herself (with her left hand) small, solemnly relished bites of a slice of bread-and-butter covered with apple sauce and powdered sugar.

Mr. Parcher looked upon her, and he shivered slightly; for he knew her to be Willie Baxter’s sister.

Unaware of the emotion she produced in him, Jane checked her hoop and halted.

“G’d afternoon, Mister Parcher,” she said, gravely.

“Good afternoon,” he returned, without much spirit.

Jane looked up at him trustfully and with a strange, unconscious fondness.  “You goin’ home now, Mr. Parcher?” she asked, turning to walk at his side.  She had suspended the hoop over her left arm and transferred the bread-and-butter and apple sauce and sugar to her right, so that she could eat even more conveniently than before.

“I suppose so,” he murmured.

“My brother Willie’s been at your house all afternoon,” she remarked.

He repeated, “I suppose so,” but in a tone which combined the vocal tokens of misery and of hopeless animosity.

“He just went home,” said Jane.  “I was ’cross the street from your house, but I guess he didn’t see me.  He kept lookin’ back at your house.  Miss Pratt was on the porch.”

“I suppose so.”  This time it was a moan.

Jane proceeded to give him some information.  “My brother Willie isn’t comin’ back to your house to-night, but he doesn’t know it yet.”

“What!” exclaimed Mr. Parcher.

“Willie isn’t goin’ to spend any more evenings at your house at all,” said Jane, thoughtfully.  “He isn’t, but he doesn’t know it yet.”

Mr. Parcher gazed fixedly at the wonderful child, and something like a ray of sunshine flickered over his seamed and harried face.  “Are you sure he isn’t?” he said.  “What makes you think so?”