ke a flower through the
dead coals on an ashheap. It was her eyes.

I never have seen the beat of her eyes for loveliness. No, I never have
seen two of them--gray they were--that could toss a God's blessing to
you so easy. They gave the lie to her cold lips and made you forget the
looks of her, because you knew she'd been made to wear ugliness to test
the sweetness of her soul.

I saw 'em when, from all the falseness and worry, all the paint and
powder and the mockery of big cities and the jest of money and all the
worry and bitterness of the end of my adventures, I felt the relief of
being nobody again and going in a home, whose ever it might be, and
being where there was trees and hard work and fewer human faces
streaming along and looking into yours, only to forget you forever. For
the first time since the day I believed I'd never meet Monty Cranch
again, my sight was all fogged with tears.

Probably she saw me. And if you'd know the kind of woman she was, I'll
tell you that the first I knew, her thin fingers was on my big hands,
and I looked up and there were those two eyes. The train was thumping
along through the meadows, but I heard her say, "There, there," very
soft and she never asked me one word about my past either then or ever
after. That was her kind of charity, and may God rest her soul!

Oh, when I look back on that day, I wonder how evil thoughts ever came
into my mind and how I could ever wish harm to the white house under the
big elms in the centre of the town, where among the business blocks it
stood very stubborn, and I wonder how I ever plotted wrong for her or
him that was her husband and met us that day at the iron gate.

We saw him reading a paper on the wide porch--a young man then, with a
big frame and a habit of looking out very solemn from under his eyebrows
and over big tortoise-shell glasses. But he had boyish, joking ways of
speech, as you know. He came down the walk between the plats of grass
that looked like two peaceful, green rugs spread in the midst of all the
noise and bustle of the town, and his long hands pulled up the latch and
he smiled at the woman as if he loved her. And she said to me in a very
proud and dignified way, "Judge Colfax, my husband."

That was the first time I ever set eyes on him, and in a quarter of a
century, beginning as he was then, a judge of county court, and ending,
as well you know, I never could see a change in his way of looking at
life. Civilizat