st have outgrown the feeling long
since, and be living happily, or at least contentedly, in her own
way. He was glad in spite of himself when he heard that she had never
married; but at least he had n't it on his conscience that _he_ had kept
her single!

On the 17th of December, Justin, his business day over, was walking
toward the dreary house in which he ate and slept. As he turned the
corner, he heard one woman say to another, as they watched a man
stumbling sorrowfully down the street: "Going home will be the worst of
all for him--to find nobody there!" That was what going home had meant
for him these ten years, but he afterward felt it strange that this
thought should have struck him so forcibly on that particular day.
Entering the boarding-house, he found Mrs. Burbank's letter with its
Edgewood postmark on the hall table, and took it up to his room. He
kindled a little fire in the air-tight stove, watching the flame creep
from shavings to kindlings, from kindlings to small pine, and from small
pine to the round, hardwood sticks; then when the result seemed certain,
he closed the stove door and sat down to read the letter. Whereupon all
manner of strange things happened in his head and heart and flesh and
spirit as he sat there alone, his hands in his pockets, his feet braced
against the legs of the stove.

It was a cold winter night, and the snow and sleet beat against the
windows. He looked about the ugly room: at the washstand with its square
of oilcloth in front and its detestable bowl and pitcher; at the rigors
of his white iron bedstead, with the valley in the middle of the
lumpy mattress and the darns in the rumpled pillowcases; at the dull
photographs of the landlady's hideous husband and children enshrined on
the mantelshelf; looked at the abomination of desolation surrounding him
until his soul sickened and cried out like a child's for something more
like home. It was as if a spring thaw had melted his ice-bound heart,
and on the crest of a wave it was drifting out into the milder waters of
some unknown sea. He could have laid his head in the kind lap of a woman
and cried: "Comfort me! Give me companionship or I die!"

The wind howled in the chimney and rattled the loose window-sashes; the
snow, freezing as it fell, dashed against the glass with hard, cutting
little blows; at least, that is the way in which the wind and snow
flattered themselves they were making existence disagreeable to Justin
Peabod