He bowed low over the little hand.
"I bid you farewell, sir," she added gently. "The truest gentleman I have met in many a day!" It was the recognition that he had craved. She had seen the man through the motley. He looked up, his face glowing as if that womanly recognition had knighted him; and with the remembrance of that touch resting on him like a royal accolade, he rode on after the procession, into the depths of the moonlighted forest.
The Fourth Traveler
Wexley Snathers
By Way of an Inherited Circus
ONLY one question was asked in the streets of Gentryville that afternoon, and it was asked from the Court-house Square to the last corner grocery in the straggling outskirts:
"If you were an undertaker like Wexley Snathers, and had a circus left to you by will, what would you do with it?" When the question was worn threadbare in business circles, it was taken home to bandy around the village supper-tables, with the final insistent emphasis, "Well, what would you do, anyhow, if you were in Wex Snathers's place?"
It would have been an intense relief to the man in question if the village could have settled the problem for him. Nothing had ever weighed so heavily upon him, not even the responsibilities of his first personally conducted funeral occasion.