her environment.

However, after the first three days had passed and there was now nothing
in the cottage to be done except to prepare her husband's supper,
breakfast, and lunch for his dinner-pail, the time began to drag on her
hands. She sat on the little porch nearly all the time, for the outside
view was more soothing than the cramped interior of the rather dark
little house. Across the vacant lots, and above the dim roofs of the
neighboring negro shanties, she saw the smoke from the town's
cotton-factories, woolen-mills and iron-foundries, the steam-whistles of
which were John's signals for early rising and her own best guide to the
approach of nightfall and her husband's longed-for return. Above the
trees, an eighth of a mile away, could be seen the roof of Mrs. Trott's
house. John had reluctantly pointed it out one evening as they stood at
the gate, and every day now she looked at it as the physical symbol of a
mystery which was growing more and more inexplicable. She had come to
feel that there was something about John's mother which he himself did
not fully understand and from which he shrank in morbid and manly
sensitiveness.

Cavanaugh had called one evening, and as the three friends sat on the
porch, the weather being warm, he had explained that his wife was still
confined to her bed and was deeply regretting her inability to come over
and see Tilly. But neither did the contractor help Tilly to solve the
brooding enigma. On the contrary, his very reticence seemed to deepen
it, for he had the disturbed air of a man avoiding some disagreeable
fact. How could it be, Tilly began to ask herself, that a man so genial
as John should have absolutely no women friends in the town of his
birth, and why was it that even his men friends should so persistently
shun his residence and show so little interest in his bride? There was
Joe Tilsbury, she recalled. What a contrast, what an inexplicable
contrast! Joe's friends had given the wife he had brought home a
far-reaching welcome, afternoon receptions, quilting-bees, dances,
straw-rides, surprise-parties, and even the jovial jokers of the
village, in grotesque costumes, had serenaded the couple with tin pans
and cow-horns. Tilly herself had taken part in the courtesies to the
wife of a man far beneath John in point of position and attainments.
What could it mean? What?

Four days after the departure of her daughter, Mrs. Whaley received the
third letter from Tilly, and