The Dutch clock in the cottage living room set up a spiteful striking: one, two, three, four (each stroke tart and inimical), five, six, seven, eight (as though from the very depths of its mechanism it would cry out against the terrific irony of life), nine, ten....
Lynndal had come all the way from Arizona.
3
"My gracious!" cried Miss Whitcom loudly and cordially, "I've been in Arizona!"
"You have?"
"Rather! I started a cactus candy business there before you were...." She paused, then wholeheartedly laughed a defiance at the very notion of grey hairs. "No, I won't say it. I won't go back so far as that. For I do believe you're thirty, sir, if you're a day."
"I'm thirty-three," confessed Barry, looking older, for just a wistful moment, than his wont.
"Well, then, when you were a youngster, we'll say, Marjory Whitcom was working fourteen long hours a day in an absurd little factory on the fringe of the desert—slaving like all possessed to make a go of it. The idea was a good one."
"Yes," he agreed, "for we're turning out wonderful cactus candy now."