"Oh--you know--walk on one stone. You know what it's a sign of."

"Do you believe in signs?" he asked. She kept hold of his arm, and
kept him from leaving the stone. She was taller than he by a head, and
he hated himself for it. They managed to keep together until they
crossed the street and came into the broader walk. Then she drew a
relieved breath and answered: "Oh, I don't know. Sometimes I do." They
were lagging far behind their friends, and the girl hummed a tune,
then she said, "You know I've always believed in my 'Star light--star
bright--first star I've seen to-night,' just as I believe in my
prayers." And she looked up and said, "Oh, I haven't said it yet." She
picked out her star and said the rhyme, closing with, "I wish I may, I
wish I might, have the wish I wish to-night."

And sitting on the car end in Arizona thirty years after, he tried to
find her star in the firmament above him. He was a man in his fifties
then, and the night she showed him her star was more than thirty years
gone by. But he remembered. We are curious creatures, we men, and we
remember much more than we pretend to. For our mothers in many cases
were women, and we take after them.

As Barclay stood in the door of his car debating whether or not to go
in, the light from the chimney of the sawmill on the hill attracted
his attention, and because he was in a mood for it, the flying sparks
trailing across the night sky reminded him of the fireworks that
Fourth of July in 1873, when he and Jane Mason and Bob and Molly spent
the day together, picnicking down in the timber and coming home to
dance on the platform under the cottonwood-bough pavilion in the
evening. It was a riotous day, and Bob and Molly being lovers of long