get a book she wanted him to
read and had been alone with her for an hour. For the
fourth or fifth time the woman had talked to him with
great earnestness and he could not make out what she
meant by her talk. He began to believe she must be in
love with him and the thought was both pleasing and
annoying.

Up from the log he sprang and began to pile sticks on
the fire. Looking about to be sure he was alone he
talked aloud pretending he was in the presence of the
woman, "Oh, you're just letting on, you know you are,"
he declared. "I am going to find out about you. You
wait and see."

The young man got up and went back along the path
toward town leaving the fire blazing in the wood. As he
went through the streets the skates clanked in his
pocket. In his own room in the New Willard House he
built a fire in the stove and lay down on top of the
bed. He began to have lustful thoughts and pulling down
the shade of the window closed his eyes and turned his
face to the wall. He took a pillow into his arms and
embraced it thinking first of the school teacher, who
by her words had stirred something within him, and
later of Helen White, the slim daughter of the town
banker, with whom he had been for a long time half in
love.

By nine o'clock of that evening snow lay deep in the
streets and the weather had become bitter cold. It was
difficult to walk about. The stores were dark and the
people had crawled away to their houses. The evening
train from Cleveland was very late but nobody was
interested in its arrival. By ten o'clock all but four
of the eighteen hundred citizens of the town were in
bed.

Hop Higgins, the night watchman, was partially awake.
He was lame and carried a heavy stick. On dark nights
he carried a lantern. Between nine and ten o'clock he
went his rounds. Up and down Main Street he stumbled
through the drifts trying the doors of the stores. Then
he went into alleyways and tried the back doors.
Finding all tight he hurried around the corner to the
New Willard House and beat on the door. Through the
rest of the night he intended to stay by the stove.
"You go to bed. I'll keep the stove going," he said to
the boy who slept on a cot in the hotel office.

Hop Higgins sat down by the stove and took off his
shoes. When the boy had gone to sleep he began to think
of his own affairs. He intended to paint his house in
the spring and sat by the stove calculating the cost of
paint and labor. That led him into