beside him; and then the years passed by in
another direction, only more slowly. And the girl seemed to get a little
older and a little older, and the hair changed and the cheeks fell a
little at the sides just below the mouth, you know, and there came
crow's feet at the outer corners of her eyes, and wrinkles across her
neck, but that nothing of all this physical happening ever changed one
iota the real look of her, the look which is from the heart of a woman
when a man has once really known her. And so the years glided over their
course, she changing a little with each, yet never really changing at
all, until it came again up to the present moment, with her beside him
on the sofa, real and tangible, just as he would have her in every way.

"I don't suppose you can understand it," he said, "for you are only a
boy in such things yet" (those old fellows call everything under fifty a
boy); "but I tell you it is a wonderful thing to know what a love is
that can come out of the catacombs, so to speak, and be all itself
again," and he said this as jauntily as if I, being so young, couldn't
know anything about the proper article, as far as sentiment was
concerned.

They sat there on the sofa, he said, still silent and looking at each
other. At last, when he had fully realized it all, he spoke.

"I knew that you were a widow, Jennie, but I did not know that you were
living here."

She explained that she had been in the city for some time and the reason
of it, and then the conversation lagged again; and they were very much
like two young people at a children's party, save that they were
dreaming rather than embarrassed, and that, I suppose, they felt the dry
germ of another age seeking the air and the sunshine of living. You
know they have found grains of wheat in the Egyptian mummy cases, which
were laid away over three thousand years ago, and that these grains of
wheat, under the new conditions, have sprouted and grown and shot up
green stalks and borne plump seeds again. And the love of Mr. and Mrs.
Parasang has always reminded me of the mummy wheat.

They talked a little of old friends and of old times, but their talk was
not all unconstrained, because, you see, they couldn't refer to those
former times and scenes without recalling, involuntarily, some day or
some hour when they two were together, and when there seemed a chain
between their hearts which nothing in the world could break. It was an
awful commentary on t