med--nothing but utter freedom to think--the grave has never
appealed to me as an escape. Madness is a shade better, perhaps; but
then that depends on the form of the illusion. For me the body has got
to work out the soul's agony. For you, words may bring relief. Try--try
anything that suggests itself."

"Do not think you will hear anything new. It will bore you. Are you
willing to listen?"

"I am indeed," I replied. We had come to a lonely farm-house, its roofs
moss-grown and sunken, the grass knee-high about it. There was hardly a
sign of life about the place, though I could see an aged man smoking a
pipe peacefully in the shade of an apple tree at the back. Everything
wore an air of melancholy, desertion and loneliness.

My companion lifted the gray gate's rusty latch. The grass was crushed
enough to form a path to the front door, which stood open. She led the
way into a large, low room off the little hall. The floor was bare.
There was a large table in the centre, heaped with books, and some
withering flowers stood in a glass. A couple of common chairs, a
mattress, on which was thrown an antique curtain of faded blue as a
drapery; on the white-washed wall, a tiny and coquetish slipper of
yellowish silk, nailed through the sole. This was all the furnishing.

She stood looking around at the barrenness curiously, trying perhaps to
see it with the eyes of a stranger. "This is my room," she said, "and
the very walls and floor are saturated with my sufferings." She went
restlessly to the window, and threw open the broken blind. As the
radiance of the afternoon flooded the place with light, I seemed to see
it and its wasting occupant, here in this horrible desolation, in the
changing seasons, when the window gave on the bitter rigors of blue and
white winter mornings, the land choked with snow, on the golden blur of
autumn, on the tender mists of April, draping the earth, and forever the
cry of the waves on the shore haunting the air. That there was nothing
of the mad woman about her, that she had retained reason in such a
place, in such a room, with an eating grief to bear, impressed me as one
of the marvels of the brain's endurance, with which nature sometimes
surprises us. It seemed to me that this might be the hour of partial
deliverance to the poor soul who had evidently lived and died so much.

"Why have you stayed here?" I asked. She had now taken the chair
fronting me. We were stiffly seated as if for a busines