Thaddeus leaned forward eagerly.
"What was the color?"
"Well—the paint was green, but there must've been some white on the brush. It appeared to be streaked."
Thaddeus settled his glasses, rested his chin on his cane, and studied the postmaster's face. There were vast vacant spaces on it, where, it seemed, one could keep on smacking green paint a long while and not lose interest.
"What's in will out," repeated Mr. Paulus, heavily. "What's in will out."
Up the hill as far as the church Thaddeus thought of the post-office as compared to the Wyantenaug Club, in what respects the post-office had good points; from the church across the sloping green, where in the dusk the pale flowers glimmered against the grass, he thought of Mr. Paulus's face smitten with paint; and so of Nellie, a slim, white ghost, with eyes that sometimes looked wistfulness after nameless things, and sometimes seemed to watch only the slow march of dreams. At the lilac gate he stopped. Some one stood a moment squarely in the little doorway, filling it with his shoulders, then turned half back and leaned against the jamb.
"Morgan Map, by—a-mm." The light shone across the profile in the door. The Maps were men of shoulders and stature, Morgan the largest of the three; hair and brows of a Celtic yellow with a glint of red in them, a face of cliffs and caverns, bones of length and massiveness. "Picts, Scots, Caractacus. Vercingetorix," Thaddeus murmured. "My education was faulty. It seems to me he should be painted blue and carry a club."
He plucked a lilac and sniffed it, leaning on the gate, looking at Morgan contemplatively and at the placid knitting widow beyond.
"If I let that damned brute jockey me, it's funny."
The militant church with its starward steeple and weather-vane telling confidently to all men which way the night winds of heaven blew, the shining windows and doorways, the scent of lilacs and the glimmer of white flowers on the grass, the rounded billows of the hills, Windless Mountain and the Cattle Ridge dark against southern and northern skies, the Four Roads, the meadows east where one knew the Mill Stream was crooning to itself—Hagar, by dusk at least, was much the same as in the consulship of Tad and Pete, now forty years later when Tad and Pete had come to consider each other exquisite absurdities. Even after another forty years, is there any change in Hagar at dusk? You cannot see how the charcoal-burners have cut along the Cattle Ridge. Tad and Pete have gone where one hopes for their sakes everything is not a solemnity. But we were speaking of Hagar when the night drops low, when the hills seem to draw near and listen, and something is said to the stars, which they admit, about past and future being foolish endeavors of language to say "now." There seems to be a background and foreground everywhere. And in the foreground things appear to be hourly critical and important.