Then wrapped in the faded splendour of a once gorgeous silk dressing-gown the old man disappeared into his bedroom, returning with a shawl crossed over his shoulders and a knitted muffler tied about his head. On opening his door he listened again for a moment, but, as the crying had not ceased, waded across his yard through the snow in his carpet slippers until he knocked with his big blue-veined old hand hard against the locked back door of a cottage adjoining his. At first there was no answer except a continuing of the sniffling, snuffling noises which only made the visitor rap more vehemently, when at length the door opened and there stood a woman holding a lantern above her head. "Uncle Ambrose Thompson, what kin you want o' me this time o' night?" she asked; "it's goin' on nine o'clock! You ain't sick?" Uncle Ambrose shook his head, surveying his neighbour sympathetically, but oh, so disparagingly! She was so plainly an old-time old maid, flat in the chest and angular, a hard and bony structure, with a face that was equally barren save that its desert waste had lately been swept by a storm. "No, I ain't sick, child," Uncle Ambrose answered, "but you are--heartsick. And what's more it seems likely I can't stand that noise you keep on a-makin'. You come over and set by my kitchen fire a space and kind er talk things out with me. I reckon I ain't altogether lost my soothin' powers!" Before his glowing fire the old host comfortably placed two rocking chairs side by side. For the past seven years Ambrose Thompson had been a widower for the third time and, since Peachy's death, having come back home from the Red Farm, had lived all alone in his once rose-coloured cottage, looked after only by his neighbours. Picking up a crazy quilt cushion from his chair, the old man surveyed it tenderly. "This was my Em'ly's make," he explained; "seems, 'Lizabeth Horton, that you and me 're most like strangers, havin' lived side by side only a little piece like seven years. Em'ly she was the second of my three wives." And then thoughtfully passing his hand backward over his high bald crown, Uncle Ambrose smiled in a kind of slow and puzzled fashion. "No, now I've done mixed things up a bit; I'm gittin' a little oncertain these days. Em'ly wasn't never the sewin' one," he continued, "besides, this crazy quiltin' business was most too new fashioned fer my Em'ly. I kin recollect now bringin' that sofy cushion in from the farm, so it must 'a' been Peachy's. Funny how I keep puttin' everything on to Em'ly these days!" Then seeing that his caller's red-rimmed eyes had been yearning toward the coffee pot at the back of his stove, the old man put it down before her with a nicked but brightly flowered cup and saucer, and afterward, settling himself in his own place, peacefully began smoking, finding a kind of unholy joy in the old maid's horrified glances about his untidy but nobly littered kitchen.