Of the days when Roger Allan
was a young, strength-mad fellow and Richard Wentworth was his chum and
her lover. And she remembered too how right Sadie Dundry was. For
Uncle Tony, in the springs of long ago, had loved the girl who was now
Mrs. Jerry Dustin.
They were such wander-mad dreamers, Tony and Rosalie, and exactly alike
in those days. They used to go together to watch an occasional picnic
train or election special go through the station, and they thought
because they were so exactly alike they would most surely marry. But
life, that wisely and for posterity's sake mates not the like but the
unlike, brought Jerry Dustin on the scene,--good, practical,
stay-at-home Jerry Dustin. And the girl who used to sit with Tony on
the station bench and watch the trains pull out into the wide big world
left her childhood friend sitting alone and went to Jerry, answered his
smile and call.
So Tony sits alone, for he still visits the station on sunny
afternoons. But now he doesn't sit on the bench but perches on the top
rail of the fence and curls his toes about the lower one.
Bernard Rollins caught him sitting so once, day-dreaming over the past.
It was Tony's face as Rollins saw it then,--full of a young, boyish
wistfulness and sweet pain, unmarred dreams and unstained, unbroken
illusions,--that Rollins wanted to paint.
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