Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the city room.djvu/210

 ideally restful days. She found the little town exactly as he had pictured it, and as she strolled along its quiet streets she wondered how the Shadow had come to know it, and when he had been there last. For a moment, the idea lingered with her that, perhaps, after all, they were to meet. It had been more than a year since the first box of roses had come to her as the one bright episode of a depressing day. But if he had ever been in Avondale, he had apparently come and gone as mysteriously as he seemed to do everything else. She made no secret of her own identity or work, but the "quaint men and women" who eyed her with such artless curiosity gratified her with no reminiscences, and had evidently never before seen a representative of a great modern newspaper. Helen Bancroft went cheerily back to her work and her rôle as the inspiration of a shadow, and if the thought occurred to her that the rôle was a trifle unsatisfactory because of the steadfast obscurity of that shadow, she stifled it as one would check disloyal thought of a friend. The conviction had already come to her woman's soul that