That John Barclay remembered, and then he remembered being in the front yard of the farm-house a moment—alone with Jane Mason, his bridle rein over his arm. Her hair was down, and she looked wild and beautiful. The straw was still burning back of the house, and the glow was everywhere. He always remembered that she held his hand and would not let him go, and there two memories are different; for she always maintained that he did, right there and then, and he recollected that as he mounted his horse he tried to kiss her and failed. Perhaps both are right—who knows? But both agree that as he sat there an instant on his horse, she threw kisses at him and he threw them back. And when the men rode away, she stood in the road, and he could see her in the light of the waning fire, and thirty years passed and still he saw her.
As the headlight of the train lit up the cinder yard, and brought the glint of the rails out of the darkness, John Barclay, a thousand miles away and thirty years after, fancied he could see her there in the railroad yards beside him waving her hands at him, smiling at him with the new-found joy in her face. For there is no difference between fifty-three and twenty-three when men are in love, and if they are in love with the same woman in both years, her face will never change, her smile will always seem the same. And to John Barclay there on the rear platform of the car, with the crash of the great train in his ears, the same face looked out of the night at him that he saw back in his twenties, and he knew that the same prayer to the same God would go up that night for him that went up from the same lips so long ago. The man on the car platform rose from his chair, and went into the car.
"Well," he said to Lycurgus Mason as the old man reached for his watch, "how about it?"
Lycurgus replied as he put it back in his pocket, "Just seven minutes and a half. She's covered a lot of track in those seven minutes!"
And John Barclay looked back over the years, and saw a boy riding like the wind through the night, changing horses every half-hour, and trying to tell time from his watch by a rising moon, but the moon was blown with clouds like a woman's hair, and he could not see the hands on the watch face. So as he looked at the old man sitting crooked over in the great leather chair, John Barclay only grunted, "Yes—she's covered a long stretch of country in those seven minutes." And he picked the Biography off the table and read to himself: "I sometimes think that only that part of the soul that loves is saved. The rest is dross and perishes in the fire. Whether the love be the love of woman or the love of kind, or the love of God that embraces all, it matters not. That sanctifies; that purifies—that marks the way of the only salvation the soul can know, and he who does not love with the fervour of a passionate heart some of God's creatures, cannot love God, and not loving Him, is lost in spite of all his prayers, in spite of all his aspirations. Therefore, if you would live you must love, for when love dies the soul shrivels. And if God takes what you love—love on; for only love will make you immortal, only love will cheat death of its victory."
And looking at Lycurgus Mason fidgeting in his chair, John Barclay wondered when he would die the kind of a death that had come to the little old man before him, and then he felt the car move under him, and knew they were going back to Sycamore Ridge.
"Day after to-morrow," said Barclay, meditatively, as he heard the first faint screaming of the heavily laden wheels under him, "day after to-morrow, Daddy Mason, we will be home with Colonel Culpepper and his large white plumes."