good deal. But it seemed
to me as if there might be a chance"; and so, without a word of
farewell, went stumbling down the stairs.

He had given a wistful look at the fire, as he turned away. Perhaps that
would comfort him. God surely has "many voices in the world, and none of
them is without its signification."

An hour before dawn, Yarrow found the place in which he had appointed to
meet his brother. The night had been dark, hailing at intervals; he had
gone tramping up and down the hills and stubble-fields, through snow and
half-frozen mud-gullies, hardly conscious of what he did. The night
seemed long to him now, looking back. He found a burnt sycamore-stump
and got up on it, shivered awhile, felt his shirt, which was wet to the
skin, then took off his shoes and cleared the lumps of slush out of
them. There was something horrible to him in this unbroken silence and
dark and wet cold: he had been in his hot cell so long, the frost stung
him differently from other men, the icy thaw was wetter. It was a narrow
cut in the hills where he was, a bridle-road leading back and running
zigzag for some miles until it returned to the railroad-track. A lonely,
unfrequented place: Frazier would take this by-path; Soule had chosen it
well to meet him. There was a rickety bridge crossing a hill-stream a
few rods beyond. Yarrow pushed the dripping cap off his forehead, and
looked around. No light nor life on any side: even in the heavens yawned
that breathless, uncolored silence that precedes a winter's dawn. He
could see the Ohio through the gully: why, it used to be a broad,
full-breasted river, glancing all over with light, loaded with steamers
and rafts going down to the Mississippi. He had gone down once, rafting,
with lumber, and a jolly three weeks' float they had of it. Now it was a
solid, shapeless mass of blocks of ice and mud. Winter? yes, but the
world was altered somehow, the very river seemed struck with death. His
teeth chattered; he began to try to rub some warmth into his rheumatic
legs and arms; tried to bring back the fancy of last night about Martha
and the fire. But that was a long way off: there were all these years'
mastering memories to fade it out, you know, and besides, a diseased
habit of desponding. The world was wide to him, cowering out from a
cell: where were Martha and the little chaps lost in it? John said they
were dead. Where should he turn now? There was an aguish pain in his
spine that blinded