he quality of human love and human pledges that
things should be as they had been and as they were. It was a reflection,
in a sense, on each of them. How hollow had been everything--and it was
all their fault.

They both kept looking at each other, and when they parted he asked if
he might call upon her, and she assented quietly. He called next day,
and found her all alone, for a niece who lived with her had gone away;
and they became, he said, a little more at ease. And then began the most
delicate of all wooings. I met them sometimes then and guessed at it,
though as yet Parasang had not told me the story. He was more
considerate, I imagine, than he had been in youth, and she, it may be,
less exacting. It was a mellow relationship, yet with a shyness that was
amazing. They were drifting together upon soft waves of memory, yet
wondering at the happening.

And one day he asked her if she would be his wife. She had known, of
course--a woman always knows--but she blushed and looked up at him, and
tears came into her eyes.

And he thought of the time, so long ago, when he had asked her the same
question. He could not help it. And somehow she did not seem less. He
thought only of how foolish they had been to throw away a heritage of
belonging to each other; and then he thought of how the man, the
protector, the guardian of both, should have taken the broader view and
have been above all pettishness and have yielded for the sake of both.
She would not have thought more lightly of him. She would have
understood some day. For the lost past he blamed himself alone.

She answered him at last, but it was not as she had answered once. She
spoke sweetly and bravely of their age and of the uselessness of it all
now, and of what people would say, and of other things. But her eyes
were just as loving as when his hair was dark.

And when she had said all those things he did what made me like him.
There was good stuff in Parasang. He merely took her in his arms.
Furthermore, he told her when they would be married. And I was at the
wedding on that day.

It was six months later when I got the habit of dining with them pretty
regularly and of calling for Parasang on my way down town in the
morning. She came into the hall with him, as do young wives, and kissed
him good-by, and it pleased and interested me amazingly. The outlines of
their mouths were not the same as they were half a century ago, and as
he bent over her I thought each