And we learn, above all, to brush the things together without
loss of time and to play a new hand with the same old hope.
As I studied the cards, making sure of my defeat--one must be most
careful to do that; a way is sometimes to be found--it was not strange
that I fell to thinking of the face on my neighbor's wall.
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.
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