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He had welcomed the sense of fatigue earlier in the evening, for it promised sleep. Now it had slipped away from him. He was strong and young, and the burning sensation that the frosty air had left on his face was the only token of the long journey. It seemed as if he would never sleep again as he lay on the lounge watching the gray ash gradually overgrow the embers, till presently only a vague dull glow gave intimation of the position of the hearth in the room. And then, bereft of this dim sense of companionship, he stared wide-eyed in the darkness, feeling the only creature alive and awake in all the world. No; the fox was suddenly barking within the quadrangle–a strangely wild and alien tone. And presently he heard the animal trot past his door on the piazza, the cushioned footfalls like those of a swift dog. He thought with a certain anxiety of the tawny tiny owl that had sat like a stuffed ornament on the mantel-piece of a neighboring room, and he listened with a quaking vicarious presentiment of woe for the sounds of capture and despair. He was sensible of waiting and hoping for the fox’s bootless return, when he suddenly lost consciousness.

How long he slept he did not know, but it seemed only a momentary respite from the torture of memory, when, still in the darkness, thousands of tremulous penetrating sounds were astir, and with a great start he recognized the rain on the roof. It was coming down in steady torrents that made the house rock before the tumult of his plunging heart was still, and he was longing again for the forgetfulness of sleep. In vain. The hours dragged by; the windows slowly, slowly denned their dull gray squares against the dull gray day dawning without. The walls that had been left with only the first dark coat of plaster, awaiting another season for the final decoration, showed their drapings of cobweb, and the names and pencilled scribblings with which the fancy of transient bushwhackers had chosen to deface them. The locust-trees within the quadrangle drearily tossed their branches to and fro in the wind, the bark very black and distinct against the persistent gray lines of rain and the white walls of the galleried buildings opposite; the gutters were brimming, roaring along like miniature torrents; nowhere was the fox or the owl to be seen. Somehow their presence would have been a relief–the sight of any living thing reassuring. As he walked slowly along the deserted piazzas, in turning sudden corners, again and again he paused, expecting that something, some one, was approaching to meet him. When at last he mounted his horse, that had neighed gleefully to see him, and rode away through the avenue and along the empty ways among the untenanted summer cottages, all the drearier and more forlorn because of the rain, he felt as if he had left an aberration, some hideous dream, behind, instead of the stark reality of the gaunt and vacant and dilapidated old house.

The transition to the glow and cheer of Sim Roxby’s fireside was like a rescue, a restoration. The smiling welcome in the women’s eyes, their soft drawling voices, with mellifluous intonations that gave a value to each commonplace simple word, braced his nerves like a tonic. It might have been only the contrast with the recollections of the night, with the prospect visible through the open door–the serried lines of rain dropping aslant from the gray sky and elusively outlined against the dark masses of leafless woods that encircled the clearing; the dooryard half submerged with puddles of a clay-brown tint, embossed always with myriads of protruding drops of rain, for however they melted away the downpour renewed them, and to the eye they were stationary, albeit pervaded with a continual tremor–but somehow he was cognizant of a certain coddling tenderness in the old woman’s manner that might have been relished by a petted child, an unaffected friendliness in the girl’s clear eyes. They made him sit close to the great wood fire; the blue and yellow flames gushed out from the piles of hickory logs, and the bed of coals gleamed at red and white heat beneath. They took his hat to carefully dry it, and they spread out his cloak on two chairs at one side of the room, where it dismally dripped. When he ventured to sneeze, Mrs. Roxby compounded and administered a “yerb tea,” a sovereign remedy against colds, which he tasted on compulsion and in great doubt, and swallowed with alacrity and confidence, finding its basis the easily recognizable “toddy.” He had little knowledge how white and troubled his face had looked as he came in from the gray day, how strongly marked were those lines of sharp mental distress, how piteously apparent was his mute appeal for sympathy and comfort.