and good they were, those brown hands, and remembering how many
kind things they had done for me. I held them now a long while, over my
heart. About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard
to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest,
realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom
of my memory.

'I'll come back,' I said earnestly, through the soft, intrusive
darkness.

'Perhaps you will'--I felt rather than saw her smile. 'But even if you
don't, you're here, like my father. So I won't be lonesome.'

As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe
that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do,
laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.

BOOK V. Cuzak's Boys

I

I TOLD ANTONIA I would come back, but life intervened, and it was twenty
years before I kept my promise. I heard of her from time to time; that
she married, very soon after I last saw her, a young Bohemian, a cousin
of Anton Jelinek; that they were poor, and had a large family. Once when
I was abroad I went into Bohemia, and from Prague I sent Antonia some
photographs of her native village. Months afterward came a letter from
her, telling me the names and ages of her many children, but little
else; signed, 'Your old friend, Antonia Cuzak.' When I met Tiny
Soderball in Salt Lake, she told me that Antonia had not 'done very
well'; that her husband was not a man of much force, and she had had
a hard life. Perhaps it was cowardice that kept me away so long. My
business took me West several times every year, and it was always in
the back of my mind that I would stop in Nebraska some day and go to see
Antonia. But I kept putting it off until the next trip. I did not want
to find her aged and broken; I really dreaded it. In the course of
twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to
lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than
anything that can ever happen to one again.

I owe it to Lena Lingard that I went to see Antonia at last. I was in
San Francisco two summers ago when both Lena and Tiny Soderball were
in town. Tiny lives in a house of her own, and Lena's shop is in an
apartment house just around the corner. It interested me, after so
many years, to see the two women together. Tiny audits Lena's accounts
occasionally, and invests her money for her; and Lena, apparently, tak