boarding-house table by Boker and Pratt, and pitied by the engineer. She
had a little room at the Dyers', which was a reflection of herself so far
as a year's occupancy and very moderate resources could make it; perhaps
for that very reason she often found her little room an intolerable prison.
One night her homesickness had taken its worst form, a restlessness, which
began in a nervous inward throbbing and extended to her cold and tremulous
finger-tips. She went softly downstairs and out on the piazza, where the
moonlight lay in a brilliant square on the unpainted boards. The moonlight
increased her restlessness, but she could not keep away from it. She dared
not walk up and down the piazza, because the people in the street below
would see her; she stood there perfectly still, holding her elbows with her
hands, crouched into a little dark heap against the side of the house.

Lights were twinkling, far and near, over the hills, singly, and in
clusters. Black figures moved across the moonlit spaces in the street.
There were sounds of talking, laughing, and singing; dogs barking;
occasionally a stir and tinkle in the scrub, as a cow wandered past. The
engines throbbed from the distant shaft-houses. A miner's wife was hushing
her baby in the next house, and across the street a group of Mexicans were
talking all at once in a loud, monotonous cadence.

In her early days at the mines there had been a certain piquancy in her
sense of the contrast between herself and her circumstances, but that had
long passed into a dreary recognition of the fact that she had no real part
in the life of the place.

She recalled one afternoon when Arnold had passed the schoolhouse, and
found her sitting alone on the doorstep. He had stopped to ask if that
"mongrel pack on the hill were worrying the life out of her," and had added
with a laugh, in answer to her look of silent disapproval, "Oh, I mean the