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He arranged the papers upon their proper shelf and in their proper order; then, as was his wont, he turned to the letters and read them one by one. To another they might have seemed stiff and precise in their language; almost formal, faintly breathing as they did the restrained affections of a woman no longer young and coming of a breed of women who almost from the cradle are by precept and example taught how to cloak the deeper and the more constant emotions beneath the ice skim of a ladylike reserve. But they satisfied their reader; they were as they always had been and as they always would be. His only complaint, mentally registered, was that the last one should bear the date of March twenty-ninth.

Having read them all he filed them away in a safe place, then brought the topmost copy of his just-received file of newspapers out upon the veranda and sat himself down to read it.

The first column always contained local news. He read of the wand drill given by the graduating class of the South New Medford Girls’ High School; of a demonstration of Wheat-Sweet Breakfast Food in the show window of Cody’s drug store; of a fire from unknown causes in Lawyer Horace Bartlett’s offices upstairs over G. A. R. Hall, damage eighty dollars; of the death of Aunt Priscilla Lyon, aged ninety-two; of a bouncing, ten-pound boy born to Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Purdy, mother and child doing well–all names familiar to him. He came to the department devoted to weddings. There was but one notice beneath the single-line head; it made a single paragraph.

He read it and as he read the words of it burned into his brain like a fiery acid. He read it, and it ran like this:

“We are informed that a surprise marriage took place this morning at Rutland. In that city Miss Hetty Stowe, of near this place, was united in the holy bonds of wedlock to Mr. Gabriel Eno, of Vergennes. We did not get the name of the officiating minister. The bride is an estimable lady who for years past has taught District School Number Four in the county. We have not the pleasure of the happy bridegroom’s acquaintance but assume he is in every way worthy of the lady he has won for a wife. Ye Editor extends congratulations to the happy pair and will print further details when secured.”

He read it through again, to the last blurred word. And as he reread a roaring and a crashing filled his ears. It was the castle of his hopes crashing down in ruins. So this, then was why the sequence of letters had been so abruptly broken off. She had lacked the courage to tell him of her faithlessness; she had chosen the course of silence, leaving him to learn of the treachery through other sources. It was cruelty piled upon cruelty compounded.

For such a sorry ending he had cut four years out of his life. For this reward of all his constancy he had endured what had been wellnigh unendurable–loneliness, homesickness, isolation, discomfort. For this he had kept his body clean and his soul clean where all about him was sloth and slackness. He thought backward upon that which he had undergone; he thought forward upon the dreary purposeless prospect that stretched unendingly before him. Never now could he bring himself to go back to the spot of his shattered dreams. And to him that was the one place in all the world worth going back to.

He put his face down upon his crossed arms, and presently there began to escape from him strangled sobs sounding most grotesquely like some strange mimicry of the name the native girls had for him–“Pooh-pooh, pooh-pooh, pooh-pooh,” over and over again repeated. Beyond his doorstep the life of the station hummed and throbbed, quickened into joyous activity by the coming of the steamer. He was not conscious of it. That roaring still was in his ears.