disparaging. He went diligently about, laughing at the town,
individually and in mass. But his laugh was the only one left in the
village: it fell upon a hollow and mournful vacancy and emptiness. Not
even a smile was findable anywhere. Halliday carried a cigar-box around
on a tripod, playing that it was a camera, and halted all passers and
aimed the thing and said "Ready!--now look pleasant, please," but not
even this capital joke could surprise the dreary faces into any
softening.

So three weeks passed--one week was left. It was Saturday evening after
supper. Instead of the aforetime Saturday-evening flutter and bustle and
shopping and larking, the streets were empty and desolate. Richards and
his old wife sat apart in their little parlour--miserable and thinking.
This was become their evening habit now: the life-long habit which had
preceded it, of reading, knitting, and contented chat, or receiving or
paying neighbourly calls, was dead and gone and forgotten, ages ago--two
or three weeks ago; nobody talked now, nobody read, nobody visited--the
whole village sat at home, sighing, worrying, silent. Trying to guess
out that remark.

The postman left a letter. Richards glanced listlessly at the
superscription and the post-mark--unfamiliar, both--and tossed the letter
on the table and resumed his might-have-beens and his hopeless dull
miseries where he had left them off. Two or three hours later his wife
got wearily up and was going away to bed without a good-night--custom
now--but she stopped near the letter and eyed it awhile with a dead
interest, then broke it open, and began to skim it over. Richards,
sitting there with his chair tilted back against the wall and his chin
between his knees, heard something fall. It was his wife. He sprang to
her side, but she cried out: