in those days. They used to go together to watch an occasional picnic
train or election special go through the station, and they thought
because they were so exactly alike they would most surely marry. But
life, that wisely and for posterity's sake mates not the like but the
unlike, brought Jerry Dustin on the scene,--good, practical,
stay-at-home Jerry Dustin. And the girl who used to sit with Tony on
the station bench and watch the trains pull out into the wide big world
left her childhood friend sitting alone and went to Jerry, answered his
smile and call.

So Tony sits alone, for he still visits the station on sunny
afternoons. But now he doesn't sit on the bench but perches on the top
rail of the fence and curls his toes about the lower one.

Bernard Rollins caught him sitting so once, day-dreaming over the past.
It was Tony's face as Rollins saw it then,--full of a young, boyish
wistfulness and sweet pain, unmarred dreams and unstained, unbroken
illusions,--that Rollins wanted to paint. Rollins knew that Mrs.
Dustin was a great friend of Tony's and that she would be the best
person to coax a consent from the shy, gentle old man.

Life, mused Grandma, was a matter full of sweet and incomprehensible
things,--things that now, after long years when the stories were almost
finished, seemed right and just enough but that at the time were cruel
and hard to bear. There was Roger Allan and that lonely stone in the
peaceful cemetery. It still seemed a cruel tragedy. Like Mrs. Jerry
Dustin she wondered often about it.

The soft spring night was full of memories and the wood fire sang of
them sadly, sweetly and softly. Grandma rose and mentally shook