ites a
man to his house, and he seldom smiles except at the children or when
visiting with Grandma Wentworth or Roger Allan, his two friends and
nearest neighbors. Sometimes he goes for long walks with his girls and
little Bobby. Most people think him a fool and he knows it.

Grandma Wentworth sighed a little as she thought of John Foster. Then
she put fresh wood on her fire and poked at the stove grate till it
glowed. She smiled as she remembered Fanny's report.

"Well, spring is here for certain. Now we'll have a wedding and some
new babies. They always come next."

Then sitting there beside her glowing stove Grandma fell to dreaming of
Green Valley and the Green Valley folks of other days, Green Valley as
it used to be in the springs of long ago. Of the days when Roger Allan
was a young, strength-mad fellow and Richard Wentworth was his chum and
her lover. And she remembered too how right Sadie Dundry was. For
Uncle Tony, in the springs of long ago, had loved the girl who was now
Mrs. Jerry Dustin.

They were such wander-mad dreamers, Tony and Rosalie, and exactly alike
in those days. They used to go together to watch an occasional picnic
train or election special go through the station, and they thought
because they were so exactly alike they would most surely marry. But
life, that wisely and for posterity's sake mates not the like but the
unlike, brought Jerry Dustin on the scene,--good, practical,
stay-at-home Jerry Dustin. And the girl who used to sit with Tony on
the station bench and watch the trains pull out into the wide big world
left her childhood friend sitting alone and went to Jerry, answered his
smile and call.

So Tony sits alone, for he still visits the station on sunny
afternoons. But now he doesn't sit on the bench but perches on the top
rail of the fence and curls his toes about the lower one.

Bernard Rollins caught him sitting so once, day-dreaming over the past.
It was Tony's face as Rollins saw it then,--full of a young, boyish
wistfulness and sweet pain, unmarred dreams and unstained, unbroken
illusions,--that Rollins wanted to paint. Rollins knew that Mrs.
Dustin was a great friend of Tony's and that she would be the best
person to coax a consent from the shy, gentle old man.

Life, mused Grandma, was a matter full of sweet and incomprehensible
things,--things that now, after long years when the stories were almost
finished, seemed right and just enough but that at the t