He hurried up the stairs to open the front doors, but Deacon Bradley was before him.  “You’re late, Jehiel,” he said severely, “and the church was cold.”

“I know, Deacon,” said the sexton humbly, “but it won’t happen again.  And I’ll be around the first thing in the morning to do that job for you.”  His voice sounded dull and lifeless.

“What’s the matter?” asked the deacon.  “Be you sick?”

“Yes, I be, but ‘tain’t nothin’.  ’Twill pass after a while.”

That evening, as he walked home after service, he told himself that he had never known so long a day.  It seemed longer than all the rest of his life.  Indeed he felt that some strange and racking change had come upon him since the morning, as though he were not the same person, as though he had been away on a long journey, and saw all things with changed eyes.  “I feel as though I’d died,” he thought with surprise, “and was dead and buried.”

This brought back to his mind the only bitter word he had spoken throughout the endless day.  Nathaniel had said, as an excuse for his haste (Jehiel insisted on his leaving that night), “You see, mother, it’s really a service to Uncle Jehiel, since he’s got nobody to keep house for him.”  He had added, in the transparent self-justification of selfish youth, “And I’ll pay it back to him every cent.”  At this Jehiel had said shortly, “By the time you can pay it back what I’ll need most will be a tombstone.  Git a big one so’s to keep me down there quiet.”

But now, walking home under the frosty stars, he felt very quiet already, as though he needed no weight to lie heavy on his restless heart.  It did not seem restless now, but very still, as though it too were dead.  He noticed that the air was milder, and as he crossed the bridge below his house he stopped and listened.  Yes, the fine ear of his experience caught a faint grinding sound.  By tomorrow the river would begin to break up.  It was the end of winter.  He surprised himself by his pleasure in thinking of the spring.

Before he went into the house after his evening chores were done, he stopped for a moment and looked back at the cleft in the mountain wall through which the railroad left the valley.  He had been looking longingly toward that door of escape all his life, and now he said goodby to it.  “Ah, well, ’twan’t to be,” he said, with an accent of weary finality; but then, suddenly out of the chill which oppressed his heart there sprang a last searing blast of astonished anguish.  It was as if he realized for the first time all that had befallen him since the morning.  He was racked by a horrified desolation that made his sturdy old body stagger as if under an unexpected blow.  As he reeled he flung his arm about the pine-tree and so stood for a time, shaking in a paroxysm which left him breathless when it passed.  For it passed as suddenly as it came.  He lifted his head and looked again at the great cleft in the mountains, with new eyes.  Somehow, insensibly, his heart had been emptied of its fiery draught by more than mere exhaustion.  The old bitter pain was gone, but there was no mere void in its place.  He felt the sweet, weak light-headedness of a man in his first lucid period after a fever, tears stinging his eyelids in confused thanksgiving for an unrecognized respite from pain.