At midnight Abbie got out of bed, picked up the dinner-bell by the clapper, and went back up-stairs to the South bedroom. The tall, bare walls of the big house, the high ceilings with their centerpieces of plaster fruits and flowers, the cold whiteness, closed her in. Having no one to talk to, she talked to herself: “It’s snowin’ hard out--why! that was what Old Chris said the night before he went away.” She began to be troubled by a queer, detached feeling; she knew that she had mislaid something, but just what she could not remember. Forebodings came to her, distressing, disquieting. There would never be any one for her to speak to--never! The big house grew terrible; the rooms echoed her steps. She would have given everything for a little house of two or three small low-ceilinged rooms close to the side-walk on a street where people passed up and down. A night came when Abbie forgot that Old Chris had gone away. She had been sitting in her chair beside the marble-topped table, staring out into the night. All day the wind had blown; snow had piled high around the porch. Her thoughts had got back to her childhood. Somehow they had centered around the old grandfather who, years before, had sat in the same window. She saw him in his chair; heard his raspy old voice, “I married Jane sixty-eight an’ a half years ago, an’ a half year in a man’s life is something, I’ll bet you. An’ I buried her thirty years ago, an’ that’s a long time, too. We never tore each other’s shirts. Jane wanted to live a quiet life. She wanted one child, an’ she was tenacious ’bout that. She never wanted any more, an’ she had three, an’ one of ’em was your Ma. She never wanted to be seen out with a baby in her arms, Jane didn’t. I made her get bundled up once or twice, an’ I hitched up the horse an’ took her ridin’ in my phaeton that cost two hundred dollars.--You’ll be in your dotage some day, Abbie. I’ve been in my dotage for years now.--Oh, I altered my life to fit Jane’s. I expected I had a wife to go out and see the neighbors with. By gosh! we never went across the street--I’ll take on goodness some day, Abbie. By goll! that’s all I’m good for to take on now.--Oh, it beat all what a boy I was. I and Mother broke our first team of oxen. When you get children, Abbie, let them raise themselves up. They’ll do better at it than a poor father or mother can. I had the finest horses and the best phaeton for miles around, but you never saw a girl a-ridin’ by the side of me.--Some men can’t work alone, Abbie. They got to have the women around or they quit. Don’t you get that kind of a man, Abbie.--Oh, she was renowned was my old mare, Kit. You never got to the end of her. She lived to be more’n thirty year, an’ she raised fourteen colts. She was a darned good little thing she was. I got her for a big black mare that weighed fourteen hundred pound, an’ I made ’em give me ten dollars, too, an’ I got her colt with her----”