e kept looking at William, and
smiling, and opening her mouth to speak, then checking herself.

"It's a pretty cold day," she said, finally.

William grunted assent without looking up. Then he motioned with his
shoulder towards the door of the other room. "Ain't it cold in
there?" he half whispered.

"I rolled her all up in my shawl; I guess she won't ketch cold; it's
thick," responded the woman, effusively, and William said no more. He
sat with his chin in his hands and his eyes fixed absently. The fire
was smoking over a low, red glow of coals, the chimney-place yawned
black before him, the hearth was all strewn with pots and kettles,
and the shelf above it was piled high with a vague household litter.
It had leaked around the chimney, and there was a great discolored
blotch on the wall above the shelf, and the ceiling. Two or three
hens came pecking around the kettles at William's feet.

To this young man, brought up in the extreme thrift and neatness of a
typical New England household, this strange untidiness, as he viewed
it through his strained mental state, seemed to have a deeper
significance, and reveal the very shame and squalor of the soul
itself, and its own existence and thoughts, by material images.

He might from his own sensations, as he sat there, have been actually
translated into a veritable hell, from the utter strangeness of the
atmosphere which his thoughts seemed to gasp in. William had never
come fully into the atmosphere of his own sin before, but now he had,
and somehow the untidy pots and kettles on the hearth made it more
real. He was conscious as he sat there of very little pity for the
girl in the other room, of very little love for her, and also of very
little love or pity for himself; he felt nothing but a kind of
horror. He saw suddenly the alien side of life, and the alien side of
his own self, which he would always have kept faced out towards
space, away from all eyes, like the other side of the moon, and that
was for the time all he could grasp.

Once or twice Mrs. Sloane volunteered a remark, but he scarcely
responded, and once he heard absently her voice and Rebecca's in the
other room. Otherwise he sat in utter silence, except for the low
chuckle of the hens and the taps of their beaks against the iron
pots, until Barney came with the minister and the minister's wife.

Barney had taken the minister aside, and asked him, stammeringly, if
he thought his wife would come. He co