But Jane evidently had something to attend to before paying her promised visit to Sally Maud Pincher, for on their arrival at the village of Ellijay, the seat of the adjoining county, she asked her obliging conveyer to put her down at the hotel, where she intended to spend the night. It was then about five o’clock in the afternoon, and she went into the little office, which looked like a parlor in a farm-house, and registered her name and was given a room with a sky-blue door and ceiling and whitewashed walls, at the head of the stairs. She sat after that at the window, looking out upon the dreary street and the lonely, red-clay road leading up the mountain, till it grew dark. She went down to the dining-room when the great brass bell was rung by a negro boy who shook it vigorously as he walked through the hall and around the house, but she had no appetite—the long, jolting journey over the rough road had weakened rather than stimulated her faint physical needs, and so she took only a glass of milk, into which she had dropped a few morsels of bread, eating the mixture with a spoon like a child. "If I’m going to do this thing," she mused, as she sat on her bed in her night-dress and twisted her hair in a knot, "the quicker it’s over the better. When I left home it seemed easy enough, but now it’s awful—simply awful!" She slept soundly from sheer fatigue, and was up the next morning and dressed before the hotel cook, an old woman, had made a fire in the range. She walked down-stairs into the empty hall and out on the front veranda, but saw no one. The ground was white with frost and the mountain air was crisp and cutting, but it seemed to have put color into her cheeks. Going through the office, where she saw no one, she went into the dining-room just as the cook was coming in from the adjoining kitchen. "Good-morning," Jane said. "I’ve got about four miles to walk, and, as I’ve lately been down sick in bed, I want to sorter take it slow and get an early start. I paid my bill before I went to bed last night, including breakfast, and if you could give me a slice of bread-and-butter and a cup of coffee that will be all I want." "Well, I can get them ready in a minute," said the woman, "but I’d hate to do a four-mile walk on as little as that." "I’ve been sort of dieting myself," Jane said, perhaps recalling her past bounty to the cats and chickens at the window of her room, "and I don’t need much."