Their departure had
something unspeakable in it--akin to sudden death, or a sickness of the
heart that made life indifferent to them.

"They must have loved this room!" I said to him one evening. It was
during the black rains of February--Dean and I with our chairs to the
fire, waiting for the Eastern mail. The night watchman's orders were to
stop for it if the trains were anywhere near on time. At this storm
season the Westbound was frequently behind and the road to town a
quagmire. We never looked for Fahey--he was the man I found there as
night watchman--before eight o'clock. It had rained and snowed off and
on since the month began. In the dark, low rooms the fire burned all
day. The dining-room, which had blue-green walls in imitation of Flemish
tapestry and weathered-oak furniture, was darkened still more by the
pines that gave a cloistered look to the view from our back windows into
a small, square court, high-walled and spread with pine-needles. The
rooms we used were two small ones united, done in white and yellow and
with slim curtains which we could crush back upon the rods; but even
there one could not see to read by daylight. This continuous, arctic
gloom added, no doubt, to the melancholy spell of the house, which
nevertheless charmed me, and held me almost with a sense of impalpable
presences sharing with Joshua and me our intimate, wistful seclusion. If
I was happy, in a luxuriously mournful sort of way, I knew that he was
not--that he grieved persistently over something that cast a greyness
over his thoughts in keeping with the atmosphere. I knew that he knew
without any names whom I meant whenever I spoke of _they_.

"Yes, they loved it," he said, answering my exclamation. "They made it,
somehow, as character is said to shape its own set of features."

"Had they lived here long?"

"For a mine house, yes. It was, of course, a home. They had no other."

"A happy one?" I ventured.

"Can any one be called happy who has the gift of strong feeling, and
two children at stake, in this world?" I had never heard him speak with
such bitterness.

"But to have any one to feel for--that is life," I said. "I wish I had
more of it myself."

"Life, then, is not happiness."

I left him the last word, and sitting so, both silent, we heard a
screen-door at the kitchen-end blow to with a bang and a clatter of
tinware that sent the blood to my face in wrath. I said something--about
Jim and his fly-doors (Jim beli