The evening times. [volume] (Grand Forks, N.D.) 1906-1914, 1911-11-06

really, was it four? For down a long
wv alley, just turning the corner of the
starry althea bush, was it the futter
Of a white gown and a pale green
ribbon? And did one see, or dream
one saw, another, a darker shape. bending and lifting
a beech bough, and passing OH? Was it a trick of
the eyes, or was it a vision of the past, made all of
shade and shadow?
1T seems to me. Eugenia," said the old man. seat
ing himself near the old woman, leaning all arm OH
the sun dial between them. without consciously read
ing again the legend thete, "that l have been in
another planet, that I have been living the life of
some one else, that, in returning from all those years
in the Orient, l take up my real life only by your
side"
81 am glad you feel so; if only for the moment"
she replied. "I myself have thought it might some-
times be pleasant to forget all the long waste of
years. Youth is so disturbed-age is so PEACEFUL
els age so peaceful? l do not find it SO. 1 pass
my time detesting it. Why, when my heart is
young, and l feel the youth of me in every thought,
should my pulses fail me and my body become a
~wreck-fgure bent"
"But it is not a wreck" said the old woman, look
ing up intently. "You do not appear greatly
changed to me, although perhaps you did at first.
Except in the way that the years have written the
script of high thoughts and actions"
High thoughts and actions of a life spent in
wringing wealth from the heathen!" not without
some bitterness. "And then to go back and finish
on the same lines, in the hot climate, and with the
hot dishes and the dark faces. For everything is
changed here. Not even you, Eugenia, are the
same"
ooh, I know it." sighed the old woman. did you
not expect it. That is if you thought at all
about it. Every year, as it passes. carries some
thing that was precious away with it. A woman is
amused at her first gray hair; it is a jest time has
played. 1t gives her then a strange sensation of
Il. 49, Il. 49, e.fk
full of an unquenchable youth. But when one day
she finds her head silvered, then she is dismayed.
The white dust of the road to death has settled on
her. She sees"
Nothing that is not, in its way, lovely stil-if
you are that woman, Eugenia. She sees her head
powdered, it may be,<as if she were a beauty Of the
seventeenth century, with her delicate brows, and
her eyes as soft and dark as stars in a misty mid
night, with a faint rose on her checks"
"Oh, such a faded rose!' she sighed.
enc. You are not the same. But something every
whit as sweet"
Like the rose that is yellowed and pressed in a
book"
"Come, come, we must not speak in this fashion,
like two shades meeting outside the tombs. At least,
I am one" he said, hurredly. "You, Eugenia, if
you were a hundred, would still be young in my
eyes! The face Of sixteen summers swims over the
face of sixty"
Lie Sixty udNC oi SuuAAAS So
where you were?"
"Do you remember one morning" she said, sud-
denly, when the honeysucMes were in bloom, and
the bees and the humming-birds made the air busy,
and the southwest wind blew from the fields where
they were tossing the hay in the sun; a day like
this; and you and l sat here by the sun dial, and
two Italian boys. going along, wandered in and
played strange tunes on their violins-
Tunes that might have been played to the
Caesars! Do I remember"
"I wonder what brought them to mind? The frag-
rance of the new mown hay, maybe. I suppose
those boys with the red crushed on their golden
skins, and their languishing large eyes, are two hob
COLLINS by this-if they are not dust and ashes"
even an old man can be picturesque. If he is
Italian"
"You would see beauty, Charles, in the bark of a
tree"
II am not purblind-yet. One morning-this was
at the beginning of life, you now-you came dane
ing down that path, wearing a white gown and pale
green ribbon. I saw beauty then"
She laughed.
"1t is pleasant to have been thought beautiful.
whatever happens" she said. "They painted my
picture in that gown. 1t hangs iii there. l go and
look at it, now and then, and feel as though I had
been dead a long while, and were revisitng the
glimpses of the moon. When I heard that you were
coming home l often went. Somehow, Charles, I
disliked to have you see it"
"You-you felt hostile to that young girl"
~, so old, SO old!
"You, forever young!'
Truly. my friend, you must use more measured
phrase. The ground on which we meet is that of
impersonal memories"
"And not hopes"
"Ah, yes, for others. We ourselves have nothing
to hope for. Our happiness lies i'll the happiness Of
those dear to lis. Mine, for instance, in that Of the
young girl you saw disappearing down the altheas.
She wears white and pale green ribbons in an inno-
cent fattery of my portrait"
"Then l really saw her. And it was not some
glamour Of long ago, a work of ~disordcred eyesight,
taut nerves-you yourself, and I by your side?"
N9T