he interior. Poor
Clifford was cut off, at once, from all his scanty resources of
enjoyment. Phoebe was not there; nor did the sunshine fall upon the
floor. The garden, with its muddy walks, and the chill, dripping
foliage of its summer-house, was an image to be shuddered at. Nothing
flourished in the cold, moist, pitiless atmosphere, drifting with the
brackish scud of sea-breezes, except the moss along the joints of the
shingle-roof, and the great bunch of weeds, that had lately been
suffering from drought, in the angle between the two front gables.

As for Hepzibah, she seemed not merely possessed with the east wind,
but to be, in her very person, only another phase of this gray and
sullen spell of weather; the East-Wind itself, grim and disconsolate,
in a rusty black silk gown, and with a turban of cloud-wreaths on its
head. The custom of the shop fell off, because a story got abroad that
she soured her small beer and other damageable commodities, by scowling
on them. It is, perhaps, true that the public had something reasonably
to complain of in her deportment; but towards Clifford she was neither
ill-tempered nor unkind, nor felt less warmth of heart than always, had
it been possible to make it reach him. The inutility of her best
efforts, however, palsied the poor old gentlewoman. She could do
little else than sit silently in a corner of the room, when the wet
pear-tree branches, sweeping across the small windows, created a
noonday dusk, which Hepzibah unconsciously darkened with her woe-begone
aspect. It was no fault of Hepzibah's. Everything--even the old
chairs and tables, that had known what weather was for three or four
such lifetimes as her own--looked as damp and chill as if the present
were their worst experience. The picture of the Puritan Colonel
shivered on the wall. The house itself shivered, from every attic of
its seven gables down to the great kitchen fireplace, which served all
the better as an emblem of the mansion's heart, because, though built
for warmth, it was now so comfortless and empty.

Hepzibah attempted to enliven matters by a fire in the parlor. But the
storm demon kept watch above, and, whenever a flame was kindled, drove
the smoke back again, choking the chimney's sooty throat with its own
breath. Nevertheless, during four days of this miserable storm,
Clifford wrapt himself in an old cloak, and occupied his customary
chair. On the morning of the fifth, when summoned