The old woman's head nodded helplessly, and yet out of her withered face her black eyes still shone with an unquenchable fire. At this instant Ambrose, catching sight of Mrs. Barrows, blew a kiss across his dividing fence to her, so that she laughed, before replying, the pleased monotonous laugh of deafness and old age.
"Ef it's an evergreen spruce you're meanin', Susan Jr., then you're more'n right, for it seems Ambrose Thompson's leaves are forever green and the sap runnin' in him same as spring. But hurry me along, I don't want to miss nothin' of this oyster party, and mebbe ef you kin set me right about in the middle of the new Sunday-school room, I kin sort er reckon on what's goin' on."
The two women then moved so rapidly down the street that they almost ran into a man who was hobbling in the opposite direction leaning on a cane; his face as dry of any human emotion as though it had been a squeezed-out dishcloth. He was attempting to move past the wheeled chair without speaking, when a claw hand reached out after him. "Scared of a female past eighty, Miner Hobbs," the old voice cheered. "Ain't it a God's blessing no woman has run off with you—yet?"
Still at the gate the smile that greeted the approach of this dried-up little man was as radiant as the love of a woman.
"It's mortal good of you, Miner, to be goin' to the oyster show with me to-night, bein's as how you hate gatherin's," Ambrose began affectionately; "you've done give up a heap of tastes fer me first and last, ain't you, old friend? Now ef you'll wait here for me a few moments longer I'll be wholly ready to join you, for I kinder thought I'd like to speak with a few friends before the supper begins."
Ambrose started hastily back toward his front door with such an unmistakably jaunty air, such a forgetting of his rheumatic joints, that Miner's ferret eyes gleamed upon him suspiciously. Besides, was he not wearing an historic long coat, a strangely rusty stovepipe hat, and a white starched shirt over which his large lavender silk tie was crossed like a breastplate, and was he not also revealing yards of newly gray trousered legs?
"You wasn't aimin' to speak to no one in particular, was ye?" Miner inquired.
The long man stopped, noticeably blushing, and then, although the rest of his face remained grave, his eyes twinkled. "S'pose you don't know, Miner, how hard it is sometimes not to lie to the folks you love just because you love 'em? The Widow Tarwater druv past here a few minutes agone, she that was Peachy Williams, and though I ain't had more'n a bowin' acquaintance with her fer nigh forty years, knowin' that the Honourable Jones and our new Baptist preacher the Rev. Elias Tupper, are both after her, I kinder thought I'd like to see which one she favours the most."
Then Ambrose went quickly inside his cottage while Miner patiently waited on the outside, understanding that this moment of withdrawal to his own bedroom before finally leaving his home had become his friend's invariable custom since the death of his second wife, Emily, five years before.
In his bedroom the elderly man was standing before his bureau, where to one side hung the daguerreotype of a young woman.