did
he bring her over the day before, or was she visiting at the
Culpeppers', or did she come over that day? It puzzled him, but he
remembered well that in the Congregational choir he and Jane sang a
duet in an anthem, "He giveth his beloved sleep." And he hummed the
old aria, a rather melancholy tune, as he sat on the car platform in
Arizona that night, and her voice came back--a deep sweet contralto
that took "G" below middle "C" as clearly as a tenor, and in her lower
register there was a passion and a fire that did not blaze in the
higher notes. For those notes were merely girlish and untrained. That
June night in '73 was the first night that he and Jane Mason ever had
lagged behind as they walked up the hill with Bob and Molly. And what
curious things stick in the memory! The man on the rear of the car
remembered that as they left the business part of Main Street behind
and walked up the hill, they came to a narrow cross-walk, a single
stone in width, and that they tried to walk upon it together, and that
his limp made him jostle her, and she said, "We mustn't do that."

"What?" he inquired.

"Oh--you know--walk on one stone. You know what it's a sign of."

"Do you believe in signs?" he asked. She kept hold of his arm, and
kept him from leaving the stone. She was taller than he by a head, and
he hated himself for it. They managed to keep together until they
crossed the street and came into the broader walk. Then she drew a
relieved breath and answered: "Oh, I don't know. Sometimes I do." They
were lagging far behind their friends, and the girl hummed a tune,
then she said, "You know I've always believed in my 'Star light--star
bright--first star I've seen to-night,' just as I believe in my
prayers." And she looked up and said, "Oh, I haven't said it yet." She
picked out her star and said the rhyme, closing with, "I wish I may, I
wish I might, have the wish I wish to-night."

And sitting on the car end in Arizona thirty years after, he tried to
find her star in the firmament above him. He was a man in his fifties
then, and the night she showed him her star was more than thirty years
gone by. But he remembered. We are curious creatures, we men, and we
remember much more than we pretend to. For our mothers in many cases
were women, and we take after them.

As Barclay stood in the door of his car debating whether or not to go
in, the light from the chimney of the sawmill on the hill attracted
his attention, and b