Beneath their wondering exclamations I felt a secret curiosity to know what impressions I had received from my night in the Frome household, and divined that the best way of breaking down their reserve was to let them try to penetrate mine.  I therefore confined myself to saying, in a matter-of-fact tone, that I had been received with great kindness, and that Frome had made a bed for me in a room on the ground-floor which seemed in happier days to have been fitted up as a kind of writing-room or study.

“Well,” Mrs. Hale mused, “in such a storm I suppose he felt he couldn’t do less than take you in-but I guess it went hard with Ethan.  I don’t believe but what you’re the only stranger has set foot in that house for over twenty years.  He’s that proud he don’t even like his oldest friends to go there; and I don’t know as any do, any more, except myself and the doctor...”

“You still go there, Mrs. Hale?” I ventured.

“I used to go a good deal after the accident, when I was first married; but after awhile I got to think it made ’em feel worse to see us.  And then one thing and another came, and my own troubles...  But I generally make out to drive over there round about New Year’s, and once in the summer.  Only I always try to pick a day when Ethan’s off somewheres.  It’s bad enough to see the two women sitting there-but his face, when he looks round that bare place, just kills me...  You see, I can look back and call it up in his mother’s day, before their troubles.”

Old Mrs. Varnum, by this time, had gone up to bed, and her daughter and I were sitting alone, after supper, in the austere seclusion of the horse-hair parlour.  Mrs. Hale glanced at me tentatively, as though trying to see how much footing my conjectures gave her; and I guessed that if she had kept silence till now it was because she had been waiting, through all the years, for some one who should see what she alone had seen.

I waited to let her trust in me gather strength before I said:  “Yes, it’s pretty bad, seeing all three of them there together.”

She drew her mild brows into a frown of pain.  “It was just awful from the beginning.  I was here in the house when they were carried up-they laid Mattie Silver in the room you’re in.  She and I were great friends, and she was to have been my bridesmaid in the spring...  When she came to I went up to her and stayed all night.  They gave her things to quiet her, and she didn’t know much till to’rd morning, and then all of a sudden she woke up just like herself, and looked straight at me out of her big eyes, and said...  Oh, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” Mrs. Hale broke off, crying.