"If I could but have it back and play it over," I heard him rather sigh than say, whereat I bethought myself of the high allegory of a game.
Musing still, I stood apart, gazing as one gazes at a fire, which in very truth I was.
"It is your shot, sir," he said, in a voice as passionless as when I first heard it years before.
My ball had but left my cue when the door opened and a servant said—
"There's a young man doon the stair, sir, and he says he wants to speak wi' the minister."
I descended, hearing as I went a rattling fusilade of ivory, which I knew was the echo of a soul's thunder-storm.
How often do we meet new faces, little recking their relation to coming years! Yet many an unfading light and many an incurable eclipse has come with a transient meeting such as this! How many a woman of Samaria goes to draw water from the well, and sees—the Lord! For I met only a boy, or better, a laddie—boyhood-breathing word!—about sixteen years of age, openly poor but pathetically decent. His clothes were coarse and cheap and even darned, bearing here and there the signatures of poverty and motherhood.
I advanced and took his hand; for that is an easy masonry, and its exercise need never be regretted even if it never be repeated. My wife once spent a plaintive day because she had wasted a hand-shake upon a caller whom she took to be an applicant for matrimony, whose emoluments were hers, but who turned out to be an agent for Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, whose emoluments were his own. Nevertheless I have always held that no true hand-shake is unrecorded in the book of life.
"And what can I do for you, my lad?" I said.