But another and even greater surprise greeted him as he toiled up the rocky slope towards his farmhouse.  The windows of the sitting-room, which were usually blank and black by night, were glittering with unfamiliar light.  Like most farmers, he seldom used the room except for formal company, his wife usually avoiding it, and even he himself now preferred the dining-room or the kitchen.  His first suggestion that his wife had visitors gave him a sense of pleasure on her account, mingled, however, with a slight uneasiness of his own which he could not account for.  More than that, as he approached nearer he could hear the swell of the organ above the roar of the swaying pines, and the cadences were not of a devotional character.  He hesitated for a moment, as he had hesitated at the fire in the woods; yet it was surely his own house!  He hurried to the door, opened it; not only the light of the sitting-room streamed into the hall, but the ruddier glow of an actual fire in the disused grate!  The familiar dark furniture had been rearranged to catch some of the glow and relieve its sombreness.  And his wife, rising from the music-stool, was the room’s only occupant!

Mrs. Rylands gazed anxiously and timidly at her husband’s astonished face, as he threw off his waterproof and laid down his carpet-bag.  Her own face was a little flurried with excitement, and his, half hidden in his tawny beard, and, possibly owing to his self-introspective nature, never spontaneously sympathetic, still expressed only wonder!  Mrs. Rylands was a little frightened.  It is sometimes dangerous to meddle with a man’s habits, even when he has grown weary of them.

“I thought,” she began hesitatingly, “that it would be more cheerful for you in here, this stormy evening.  I thought you might like to put your wet things to dry in the kitchen, and we could sit here together, after supper, alone.”

I am afraid that Mrs. Rylands did not offer all her thoughts.  Ever since Mr. Hamlin’s departure she had been uneasy and excited, sometimes falling into fits of dejection, and again lighting up into hysterical levity; at other times carefully examining her wardrobe, and then with a sudden impulse rushing downstairs again to give orders for her husband’s supper, and to make the extraordinary changes in the sitting-room already noted.  Only a few moments before he arrived, she had covertly brought down a piece of music, and put aside the hymn-books, and taken, with a little laugh, a pack of cards from her pocket, which she placed behind the already dismantled vase on the chimney.

“I reckoned you had company, Ellen,” he said gravely, kissing her.

“No,” she said quickly.  “That is,” she stopped with a sudden surge of color in her face that startled her, “there was—­a man—­here, in the kitchen—­who had a lame horse, and who wanted to get a fresh one.  But he went away an hour ago.  And he wasn’t in this room—­at least, after it was fixed up.  So I’ve had no company.”