now. He was the last man, however, to ask for sympathy or
help; and this was not due to misanthropy, but simply to temperament
and habits of life. He and his wife had been sufficient for each
other, and the outside world was excluded chiefly because they had not
time or taste for social interchanges. As a result, he suffered
serious disadvantages; he was misunderstood and virtually left to meet
his calamity alone.

But, indeed he could scarcely have met it in any other way. Even to
his wife, he had never formed the habit of speaking freely of his
thoughts and feelings. There had been no need, so complete was the
understanding between them. A hint, a sentence, reveled to each other
their simple and limited processes of thought. To talk about her now
to strangers was impossible. He had no language by which to express
the heavy, paralyzing pain in his heart.

For a time he performed necessary duties in a dazed, mechanical way.
The horses and live stock were fed regularly, the cows milked; but the
milk stood in the dairy room until it spoiled. Then he would sit down
at his desolate hearth and gaze for hours into the fire, until it sunk
down and died out. Perhaps no class in the world suffers from such a
terrible sense of loneliness as simple-natured country people, to whom
a very few have been all the company they required.

At last Holcroft partially shook off his stupor, and began the
experiment of keeping house and maintaining his dairy with hired help.
For a long year he had struggled on through all kinds of domestic
vicissitude, conscious all the time that things were going from bad to
worse. His house was isolated, the region sparsely settled, and good
help difficult to be obtained under favoring auspices. The few
respectable women in the neighborhood who occasionally "lent a hand" in
other homes than their own would not compromise themselves, as they
expressed it, by "keepin' house for a widower." Servants obtained from
the neighboring town either could not endure the loneliness, or else
were so wasteful and ignorant that the farmer, in sheer desperation,
discharged them. The silent, grief-stricken, rugged-featured man was
no company for anyone. The year was but a record of changes, waste,
and small pilferings. Although he knew he could not afford it, he tried
the device of obtaining two women instead of one, so that they might
have society in each other; but either they would not stay or else he
foun