There was a scramble for the door and Grandma Wentworth's heart ached for John Foster, the big, silent, steady man who brushes his girls' hair every Sunday morning and brings them fresh hair ribbons and who somehow manages to get them to Sunday School looking half respectable. John never says a word scarcely to any one, from one week's end to the other. He never spends a free hour away from home, he never invites a man to his house, and he seldom smiles except at the children or when visiting with Grandma Wentworth or Roger Allan, his two friends and nearest neighbors. Sometimes he goes for long walks with his girls and little Bobby. Most people think him a fool and he knows it. Grandma Wentworth sighed a little as she thought of John Foster. Then she put fresh wood on her fire and poked at the stove grate till it glowed. She smiled as she remembered Fanny's report. "Well, spring is here for certain. Now we'll have a wedding and some new babies. They always come next." Then sitting there beside her glowing stove Grandma fell to dreaming of Green Valley and the Green Valley folks of other days, Green Valley as it used to be in the springs of long ago. 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. Rollins knew that Mrs. Dustin was a great friend of Tony's and that she would be the best person to coax a consent from the shy, gentle old man.