country gentle-woman,
in a little country town?

Barry stared out at the morning fields and hills, where fog and
sunshine were holding their daily battle, and his heart sang within him.

Fog held the field at Santa Paloma when he reached it, the station
building dripped somberly. Main Street was but a line of vague shapes
in the mist. No grown person was in sight, but Barry was not ten feet
from the train before a screaming horde of small boys was upon him,
with shouted news in which he recognized the one word, over and over:
"Fire!"

It took him a few minutes to get the sense of what they said. He stared
at them dully. But when he first repeated it to himself aloud, it
seemed already old news; he felt as if he had known it for a very long
time: "The MAIL office caught fire yesterday, and the whole thing is
burned to the ground."

"Caught fire yesterday, and the whole thing is burned to the ground:
yes, of course," Barry said. He was not conscious of starting for the
scene, he was simply there. A fringe of idle watchers, obscured in the
fog, stood about the sunken ruins of what had been the MAIL building.
Barry joined them.

He did not answer when a dozen sympathetic murmurs addressed him,
because he was not conscious of hearing a single voice. He stood
silently, looking down at the twisted great knots of metal that had
been the new presses, the great wave of soaked and half-burned
newspapers that had been the last issue of the MAIL. The fire had been
twenty-four hours ago, but the ruins were still smoking. Lengths of
charred woodwork, giving forth a sickening odor, dripped water still;
here and there brave little spurts of flame still sucked noisily. A
twisted typewriter stood erect in steaming ashes; a lunch-basket, with
a red, fringed napkin in it, had somehow escaped with only a wetting.
Barry noticed that the walls of the German bakery next door were badly
singed, that one show-window was cracked across, and that the frosted
wedding-cake inside stood in a pool of dirty water.

He was presently aware that someone was telling him that nobody was to
blame. Details were volunteered, and he listened quietly, like a
dispassionate onlooker. "Hits you pretty hard, Barry," sympathetic
voices said.

"Ruins me," he answered briefly.

And it dawned upon him sickly and certainly that it was true. He was
ruined now. All his hopes had been rooted here, in what was now this
mass of wet ashes steaming up into the fog. He