"Mr. Goodfriend wants to see you, Ma'am; his wife's gone."
It was a wild and desolate night with gusty drifts of rain, and rapidly gathering dark. The trees were giving up their leaves in fitful showers; the world was soaked and sodden. Abel came around to the side veranda sheltered from the storm, where he had told me of his marriage. I noticed how heavy his step had become. He sank into the first chair he reached, his empty pail rattling against its side.
We sat long and silent in the benison of the dark. I could not venture to intrude upon the sanctuary of his grief with cold words of commonplace consolation.
It was for him that lonely hour when the soul comes face to face with the instability of all things mortal and reads the doom of its happiness.
He spoke once or twice in whispers, as if thinking half aloud, words that were lost in the shouting of the gale among the writhing trees without. Once I caught the sentence, "Mebbe we was too fond o' one another." Was it the strange sense we have that happiness is alien—something that must be paid
