ot know clearly just what he had expected upon his return, but
then he had not expected the kind of return that he had experienced.
There had been nothing epochal in it. Even his job was waiting for
him; it seemed to him even the same routine details. One file of
correspondence that he had found upon his desk that first morning had
had a singularly familiar look. It would always stick in his memory.
First there had been a moment of high anticipation at the station with
the taxi-men calling out the names of the hotels, and stretched across
Main Street he remembered seeing a large banner flanked with bunting
and with "Welcome Home" inscribed thereon. Then he had watched the
familiar landmarks as he rolled southward in the street car with an
odd little feeling of "Hello, there you are again"; and the Works,
looming up in the distance at the end of the line, with its tall brick
stack, was a sort of culmination. Not exactly a culmination, either,
for he was conscious of a jarring note. Then the oak-panelled lobby,
with the time clock, a sombre monitor, took just another grain of
carefree satisfaction from the sum total of his feelings; and
finally--his desk, and the worn, thumb-edged file! The first letter
therein! "Recent shipments castings EE23, G143, F47, and J29 have come
to us unannealed. J29 shows fins and sprues; the hole in EE23 is in
most cases completely closed; and G143 and F47 are so rough that they
will not fit into their respective sockets without machining. Will
return same via local freight to-day." That was all. An Homeric
welcome into very deep water! Such had been Joe Hooper's homecoming.

As for Mary Louise:--well, there had been nothing quite so definite.
He had met her at the tea room--there had been one final week of
closing after his arrival--and he had not quite made up his mind about
her before she had left for Bloomfield, beyond a certain stiffening of
fibre, an aloofness that was new, and a business-like air that seemed
to say "Come across," that he did not exactly like. But then a week is
not a very long time to get down to bed-rock with a person, especially
when that person is busy ten hours out of the day and thinking the
other fourteen about the ten that have just passed.

Four weeks had rolled around. It was the first of May. Joe sat at his
desk absently fingering a stack of paper slips. They were reports from
the various assembling shops advising him of the number of bolts of
certain styles