The Partridge Hunter's mouth began to twist. "It's a horrid thing to say," he stammered, "but there ought to be a sample shroud in every home, so that when your husband is late to dinner, or your daughter smokes a cigarette, or your son decides to marry the cook, you could get out the shroud and try it on the offender, and make a few experiments concerning--well, _values_. Why, I saw a man last week dragged by a train--jerked in and out and over and under, with his head or his heels or the hem of his coat just missing Death every second by the hundred-millionth fraction of an inch. But when he was rescued at last and went home to dinner--shaken as an aspen, sicker than pulp, tongue-tied like a padlock--I suppose, very likely, his wife scolded him for having forgotten the oysters." The Partridge Hunter's face flushed suddenly. "I didn't care much for Alrik's Wife," he attested abruptly. "I always thought she was a trivial, foolish little crittur. But if I had known that I was never going to see her again--while the sun blazed or the stars blinked--I should like to have gone back from the buckboard that last morning and stroked her brown hair just once away from her eyes. Does that seem silly to you?" "Why, no," I said. "It doesn't seem silly at all. If I had guessed that the Blue Serge Man was going off on such a long, long, never-stop journey, I might even have kissed him good-by. But I certainly can't imagine anything that would have provoked or astonished him more! People can't go round petting one another just on the possible chance of never meeting again. And goodness gracious! nobody wants to. It's only that when a person actually _dies_, a sort of subtle, holy sense in you wakes up and wishes that just once for all eternity it might have gotten a signal through to that subtle, holy sense in the other person. And of course when a youngster dies, you feel somehow that he or she must have been different all along from other people, and you simply wish that you might have guessed that fact sooner--before it was too late." The Partridge Hunter began to smile. "If you knew," he teased, "that I was going to be massacred by an automobile or crumpled by an elevator before next October--would you wish that you had petted me just a little to-day?" "Yes," I acknowledged. The Partridge Hunter pretended he was deaf. "Say that once again," he begged. "Y-e-s," I repeated. The Partridge Hunter put back his head and roared. "That's just about like kissing through the telephone," he said. "It isn't particularly satisfying, and yet it makes a desperately cunning sound."