d
you lose them?" and then to get a good square look into her eyes. It
was only a few seconds in the long evening--less than a second that
their eyes met; but it was enough to be remembered forever; though
why--you say! It was all so commonplace; there was nothing in it that
you would have thought worth remembering for a moment. "Bob, did you
take my gloves?" "Why, did you lose them?" and then a glance of the
eyes. Surely there are more romantic words than these. But when a man
and a woman go in for collecting antiques in their dialogues, Heaven
only knows what old rubbish you will find in their attics, scoured off
and rebuilt and polished with secret tears until the old stuff glows
like embers.

And that is why, when the music was silent in Culpepper Hall, and the
tall young man walked slowly home alone, as he clicked his own gate
behind him, he brought from his pocket two little white gloves,--just
two ordinary white gloves,--and held them to his lips and lifted his
arms in despair once and let them drop as he stood before his
doorstep. And that is why a girl, a little girl with the weariest face
in the town, looked out of her bedroom window that night and whispered
over and over to herself the name she dared not speak. And all this
was going on while the town was turning over in its bed, listening to
the most tumultuous charivari that Sycamore Ridge has ever known.

Night after night that summer faithful Jake Dolan walked the streets
of Sycamore Ridge with Bob Hendricks. By day they lived apart, but at
night the young man often would look up the elder, and they would walk
and walk together, but never once did Hendricks mention Molly's name
nor refer to her in any way; yet Jake Dolan knew why they walked
abroad. How did he know? How do we know so many things in this world
that are neither seen nor heard? And the Irish--they have the drop of
blood that defies mathematics; the Irish are the only people in the
world whom kind Providence permits to add two and two together to make
six. "You say 'tis four," said Dolan, one night, as he and Hendricks
stood on the bridge listening to the roar from the dam. "I say 'tis
six. There is this and there is that and you say they make the other.
Not at all; they make something else entirely different. You take your
two and your two and make your four and try your four on the world,
and it works--yes, it works up to a point; but there is something
left over, something unexplained; y