Persistence of a window's title?

Is a screen-window's title supposed to persist?

I have created two windows in one "screen" session.  I have titled them 
both by typing "CONTROL-a" followed by a colon followed by the word 
"title" followed by my title, one for each window.

I have the titles permanently displayed at the bottom of the window by 
two lines in my "~/.screenrc" file:

     hardstatus alwayslastline
     hardstatus string "%w"

I don't know if it makes any difference, but I also have

     altscreen on

The problem is that the screen-window titles do not persist. After I 
enter a command like "ls", the title changes to something like

username@machine:~/Man

where the directory name is the first first three characters of the name 
of the current directory in my home directory.

Is the lack of persistence working as designed, a bug, or am I missing 
something?

My version/release of "screen" on Fedora is 4.6.2-8.fc30.

Thanks for any help,

-- Steve Ross