dering the matter.

"Oh! everything is different, now--and getting more different all the
time. My new work, and your new work, you know."

"I should like to think," said Jim, "that we are beginning over again."

"Oh, we are, we are, indeed! I am quite sure of it."

"And yet," said Jim, "there is no such thing as a new beginning.
Everything joins itself to something which went before. There isn't any
seam."

"No?" said Jennie interrogatively.

"Our regard for each other," Jennie noted most pointedly his word
"regard"--"must be the continuation of the old regard."

"I hardly know what you mean," said Jennie.

Jim reached over and possessed himself of her hand. She pulled it from him
gently, but he paid no attention to the little muscular protest, and
examined the hand critically. On the back of the middle finger he pointed
out a scar--a very tiny scar.

"Do you remember how you got that?" he asked.

Because Jim clung to the hand, their heads were very close together as she
joined in the examination.

"Why, I don't believe I do," said she.

"I do," he replied. "We--you and I and Mary Forsythe were playing
mumble-peg, and you put your hand on the grass just as I threw the
knife--it cut you, and left that scar."

"I remember, now!" said she. "How such things come back over the memory.
And did it leave a scar when I pushed you toward the red-hot stove in the
schoolhouse one blizzardy day, like this, and you peeled the skin off your
wrist where it struck the stove?"

"Look at it," said he, baring his long and bony wrist. "Right there!"

And they were off on the trail that leads back to childhood. They had
talked long, and intimately, when the shadows of the early evening crept
into the corners of the room. He had carried her across the flooded slew
again after the big rain. They had relived a dozen moving incidents by
flood and field. Jennie recalled the time when the tornado narrowly missed
the schoolhouse, and frightened everybody in school nearly to death.

"Everybody but you, Jim," Jennie remembered. "You looked out of the window
and told the teacher that the twister was going north of us, and would
kill somebody else."

"Did I?" asked Jim.

"Yes," said Jennie, "and when the teacher asked us to kneel and thank God,
you said, 'Why should we thank God that somebody else is blowed away?' She
was greatly shocked."

"I don't see to this day," Jim asserted, "what answer there was to my
question."

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