ith
anguish, and absently. This time--and the following night--the wives
fidgeted feebly, and tried to say something. But didn't.

And the night after that they found their tongues and
responded--longingly:

"Oh, if we COULD only guess!"

Halliday's comments grew daily more and more sparklingly disagreeable
and disparaging. He went diligently about, laughing at the town,
individually and in mass. But his laugh was the only one left in the
village: it fell upon a hollow and mournful vacancy and emptiness. Not
even a smile was findable anywhere. Halliday carried a cigar-box around
on a tripod, playing that it was a camera, and halted all passers and
aimed the thing and said "Ready!--now look pleasant, please," but
not even this capital joke could surprise the dreary faces into any
softening.

So three weeks passed--one week was left. It was Saturday evening after
supper. Instead of the aforetime Saturday-evening flutter and bustle and
shopping and larking, the streets were empty and desolate. Richards and
his old wife sat apart in their little parlour--miserable and thinking.
This was become their evening habit now: the life-long habit which had
preceded it, of reading, knitting, and contented chat, or receiving or
paying neighbourly calls, was dead and gone and forgotten, ages ago--two
or three weeks ago; nobody talked now, nobody read, nobody visited--the
whole village sat at home, sighing, worrying, silent. Trying to guess
out that remark.

The postman left a letter. Richards glanced listlessly at the
superscription and the post-mark--unfamiliar, both--and tossed the
letter on the table and resumed his might-have-beens and his hopeless
dull miseries where he had left them off. Two or three hours later
his wife got wearily up and was going away to bed without a
good-night--custom now--but she stopped near the letter and eyed it
awhile with a dead interest, then broke it open, and began to skim it
over. Richards, sitting there with his chair tilted back against the
wall and his chin between his knees, heard something fall. It was his
wife. He sprang to her side, but she cried out:

"Leave me alone, I am too happy. Read the letter--read it!"

He did. He devoured it, his brain reeling. The letter was from a distant
State, and it said:

"I am a stranger to you, but no matter: I have something to tell. I
have just arrived home from Mexico, and learned about that episode. Of
course you do not know who made that r