I had mused often upon it since that first night.  It seemed, curiously enough, to be a face that had long been mistily afloat in my shut eyes, a girl’s face that had a trick of blending from time to time with the face of another I had better reason to know.  Unaccountably they had come and gone, one followed by the other.  Of that last new face in my vision I could make nothing, save that some one seemed to have painted it over there in the other house.  How I had come by my own mind copy of it was a mystery to me beyond solution.

I played the game again to still this perplexity which had a way of seizing me at odd moments.  It is an especially good game for a man who has had to believe that life will always beat him.

CHAPTER XIX

A WORTHLESS BLACK HOUND

After an autumn speciously benign came our season of cold and snow.  It proved to be a season of unwonted severity, every weather expert in town, from Uncle William McCormick, who had kept a diary record for thirty years, to Grandma Steck, who had foretold its coming from a goose-bone, agreeing that the cold was most unusual.  The editor of the Argus not only spoke of “Nature’s snowy mantle,” but coined another happy phrase about Little Arcady being “locked in the icy embrace of winter.”  This was admitted to be accurately literal, in spite of its poetic daring.

Miss Caroline confessed homesickness to me after the first heavy snow.  She spoke as lightly of it as she should have done, but I could see that her own land pulled at her heart with every blast that shook her casements.  No longer, however, was there even a second-cousin whose hospitality she was free to claim, for Colonel Lucius Quintus Peavey, C.S.A., now slept with his fathers in far-off Virginia, leaving behind him only traditions and a little old sherry.  The former Miss Caroline had always shared with him, and a cask of the latter he bequeathed to her with his love.  And the valley being now void of her kin, she was doubly an exile.

Such new desolation as she must have felt was masked under jesting dispraise of our execrable Northern climate.  Surely a land permitted to congeal so utterly had forfeited the grace of its Maker.

Clem’s lack of executive genius also earned a meed of my neighbor’s disparagement.  He was a worthless, trifling “boy,” an idling dreamer, an irresponsible, inconsequent visionary, in whose baseless fancies it was astounding that a woman of her years should fatuously place reliance.

I must confess that I was more than once guilty of irritation when Miss Caroline spoke thus slightingly of her “boy”—­of one who had been unable to view himself as other than her personal property.  Again and again it seemed to me that, fine little creature that she was, her tone toward Clem lacked the right feeling.  I should not have demanded gratitude precisely; at least no bald expression of it.  But a manner of speech denoting, if not wording, a recognition of his unswerving loyalty would have accorded better with the estimate I had otherwise formed of her character.  The absence of any tone or word that even one so devoted as I could construe to her advantage was puzzling in the extreme.