a thing to her; so John asked credulously: "You did? Well, well! Say,
what did she say to that?"

"That's it--" responded Lycurgus. "That's it. What could she say? I
had her." He walked the length of the room proudly, with his hands
thrust into his pockets.

Barclay moved his chair to the rear of the car, where he sat smoking
and looking into the clear star-lit heavens above the desert. And his
mind went back thirty years to the twilight in June after he had set
off the powder keg in the culvert under Main Street in Sycamore Ridge,
and he tried to remember how Jane Mason got over from Minneola--did
he bring her over the day before, or was she visiting at the
Culpeppers', or did she come over that day? It puzzled him, but he
remembered well that in the Congregational choir he and Jane sang a
duet in an anthem, "He giveth his beloved sleep." And he hummed the
old aria, a rather melancholy tune, as he sat on the car platform in
Arizona that night, and her voice came back--a deep sweet contralto
that took "G" below middle "C" as clearly as a tenor, and in her lower
register there was a passion and a fire that did not blaze in the
higher notes. For those notes were merely girlish and untrained. That
June night in '73 was the first night that he and Jane Mason ever had
lagged behind as they walked up the hill with Bob and Molly. And what
curious things stick in the memory! The man on the rear of the car
remembered that as they left the business part of Main Street behind
and walked up the hill, they came to a narrow cross-walk, a single
stone in width, and that they tried to walk upon it together, and that
his limp made him jostle her, and she said, "We mustn't do that."

"What?" he inquired.