Day after day, as I sit behind my counter, or warm my old hands by the cheerful blaze of the fire, do customers come to me to buy something or perhaps to sell some loved relic in order that they may live.
All of them faces strange and new. They look at me as if to say Why this one dried leaf of another year left on this tree? Aye, and why am I left—Why among these young, green leaves am I the only withered one? Why were no companions left to cheer me?
But these are questions I can not answer, for I know not the ways of God.
As I sit here musing over the past, faces I have known come back to me and I love to wonder what fate held in store for them, as advancing, the filmy mists of their futures were slowly lifted until the last veil was drawn back and the story of their lives was told.
The snow is falling and covering in white the grim rows of houses opposite my little shop, the streets are deserted save by a few hurrying pedestrians and some merry school children going down to the frozen river for an hour's skating before dusk—
And I am here before the fire, dreaming and waiting, for yesterday brought me an experience very different from my usual monotonous life.
Was it all some phantom? It must be.
The Miriam that I have longed for all these years was not here yesterday, did not sit in this very chair. It must have been a vision, the mere fancy of an old man's mind. For how many times in sleep has not the same dream come to me as a whispered message from another world, from her grave even—and on awakening I always seemed to know that her journey through life was at an end.
But no, it was not a phantom, for here is the necklace. Then it was not a dream. Fate has really sent her to me so we can cheer each other in these, the last hours of our earthly lives.
But will she come back today as she promised? Or will she depart again, this time for good, so that I shall see her no more until I have crossed the River of Death.