“Mademoiselle, it is too much,” he gasped. “Your courage—your generosity—I insult you unforgivably and you give me back honour, love, life—I cannot say——” And he sank into a chair and covered his face with his hands.
She went over to him and laid her hand gently on his shoulder.
“I am glad you are happy, Count,” she said, “and I am sure we shall be very good friends. Please take me home now.”
They met Bob halfway, striding along with an anxious face, his rifle over his shoulder. “This is my brother, Mr. Stacey,” said Gertrude. “Bob, this is Count Marovitch, of whom Varinka wrote. He starts to-morrow by dog train to the States on his way to Russia.”
THE OLD THINGS
By Jessie Anderson Chase
Like Sir Roger’s neighbours peering over the hedge, I had daily observed, over my stone wall, a very old gentleman in his shirt sleeves, who pleasantly gave me the rôle of Spectator. A New-Englander of the elder type, with the heavy bent head of the thinker; but, particularly, with the piercing yet so kindly humorous blue eye that loses none of its colour with age, but seems to grow more vivid and vital with the same years that steal from the hair its hue of life and from the walnut cheek its glowing red.
Such an eye, to a lawyer like myself, accustomed to look for a human document in every human face, seemed the very epitome of eighty years: a carefree boyhood among contemporaries—in house furnishings, in barn and pigsty, orchard and gardens; a youth that sees already a new generation in most of these companions of his earthly pilgrimage; a middle age, forced out of the romantic sense of companionship on the road, into the persistent and finally triumphant view of using environment for ends of its own; and then old age, free to return and lavish forgotten endearments upon the “old things!” This or the other “landmark,” dear, and familiar from life’s beginnings. These periods, all slipping unnoticed into their successors, yet each possessing a distinct and tangible outline and colour, had all had their turn at my neighbour’s blue eyes. And the look that comes only at the end, when the life has been prodigal of response and of an unswerving fidelity in the storing up of values—that was the look that I valued as a thing of price.
It was a day of late summer that brought me more directly face to face with its beauty and gravity. The old gentleman appeared, in his shirt sleeves, but with plenty of ceremony in his quiet demeanour, at the door of my little “portable” law office, at the edge of the orchard.
“I am told, sir,” he began, “that you are an attorney at law.”