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.