unfurling his umbrella. "The hotel is only four blocks away--you'll find
me there to-morrow morning if you call. But mind you tell your wife just
what I told you--and no meandering of your own--you hear! She'll strike
out some idea with her woman's wits, you bet. Good-night, old man!" He
reached out his hand, pressed Blandford's strongly and potentially, and
strode down the street.

Blandford hitched his steaming horse to a sleet-covered horse block
with a quick sigh of impatient sympathy over the animal and himself, and
after fumbling in his pocket for a latchkey, opened the front door.
A vista of well-ordered obscurity with shadowy trestle-like objects
against the walls, and an odor of chill decorum, as if of a damp but
respectable funeral, greeted him on entering. A faint light, like a cold
dawn, broke through the glass pane of a door leading to the kitchen.
Blandford paused in the mid-darkness and hesitated. Should he first go
to his wife in the back parlor, or pass silently through the kitchen,
open the back gate, and mercifully bestow his sweating beast in the
stable? With the reflection that an immediate conjugal greeting, while
his horse was still exposed to the fury of the blast in the street,
would necessarily be curtailed and limited, he compromised by quickly
passing through the kitchen into the stable yard, opening the gate,
and driving horse and vehicle under the shed to await later and more
thorough ministration. As he entered the back door, a faint hope that
his wife might have heard him and would be waiting for him in the hall
for an instant thrilled him; but he remembered it was Sunday, and that
she was probably engaged in some devotional reading or exercise.
He hesitatingly opened the back-parlor door with a consciousness of
committing some unreasonable trespass, and entered.

She was there, sitting quietly before a large, round, shining