ains thundered through a cut not far from the rear
fence, and the cars of the Sycamore Traction Company rumbled by at
intervals. The cottage was old but comfortable, and it was remarked that
Kirkwood had probably chosen it for the reason that he could go to and
from his office without passing his abandoned home. Phil liked living on
Main Street. Her devotion to that thoroughfare had been a source of
great pain to her aunts. Even as her Uncle Amzi absorbed local color
from the steps of his bank, Phil was an alert agent in the field, on
nodding terms with the motormen of the interurban cars, and with the
jehus, who, cigarette in mouth and hat tipped on one side, drove the
village hacks. Captain Joshua Wilson, who had been recorder of his
county continuously since he lost a leg at Missionary Ridge, and who
wrote a poem every year for the reunion of his regiment, had written
certain lines for the "Evening Star" in which "P. K." was addressed as
the Diana of Main Street. As to the soundness of his mythology there
might be debate, but there was no question as to Phil's thorough
identification with Main Street, all the way from her father's house,
past the court-house, shops, and banks, out to the old Sugar Creek
Bridge where the town became country without any warning whatever.

It was Judge Walters who first called her "Otherwise Phyllis." This was
in Phil's school days before she passed from her aunts' custody. The
judge delighted in Phil's battles with the aunts. Whenever his wife
began to recount a day's occurrences at the supper-table, and the
recital opened promisingly, it was the judge's habit to cut short her
prefaces with, "Otherwise Phyllis--" and bid her hurry on to the
catastrophe, sparing no tragic detail.

Kirkwood had never, from the day his wife left him, offered himself in
the market-place as an object of sympathy. He had been a man of reserves
at all times, and the sudden termination of his married life had merely
driven him in further upon himself. If he was broken-hearted, the
fragments were well hidden. He felt that he was a failure, and he saw
men of less ability passing him in the race. Now and then he had roused
himself under stress and demonstrated his unusual gifts by striking
successes; but after one of these spurts he would relapse into an
indifference to which he seemed increasingly ready to yield.

He had risen this morning with a new resolution, attributable to his
talk with Nan Bartlett the n