That John Barclay remembered, and then he remembered being in the
front yard of the farm-house a moment--alone with Jane Mason, his
bridle rein over his arm. Her hair was down, and she looked wild and
beautiful. The straw was still burning back of the house, and the glow
was everywhere. He always remembered that she held his hand and would
not let him go, and there two memories are different; for she always
maintained that he did, right there and then, and he recollected that
as he mounted his horse he tried to kiss her and failed. Perhaps both
are right--who knows? But both agree that as he sat there an instant
on his horse, she threw kisses at him and he threw them back. And when
the men rode away, she stood in the road, and he could see her in the
light of the waning fire, and thirty years passed and still he saw
her.

As the headlight of the train lit up the cinder yard, and brought the
glint of the rails out of the darkness, John Barclay, a thousand miles
away and thirty years after, fancied he could see her there in the
railroad yards beside him waving her hands at him, smiling at him with
the new-found joy in her face. For there is no difference between
fifty-three and twenty-three when men are in love, and if they are in
love with the same woman in both years, her face will never change,
her smile will always seem the same. And to John Barclay there on the
rear platform of the car, with the crash of the great train in his
ears, the same face looked out of the night at him that he saw back in
his twenties, and he knew that the same prayer to the same God would
go up that night for him that went up from the same lips so long ago.
The man on the car platform rose from his chair, and went into the
car.

"Well," he said to Lycurgus Mason as the old man reached for his