In the smoking-car the air was like the fumes in the stemming room of a tobacco factory, but lighting a cigar, I leaned back on one of the hard, plush-covered seats, and stared out at the low, pale landscape beyond the window. It was late November, and the sombre colours of the fields and of the leafless trees showed through a fine autumnal mist, which lent an atmosphere of melancholy to the stretches of fallow land, to the harvested corn-fields, in which the stubble stood in rows, like a headless army, and to the long red-clay road winding, deep in mud, to the distant horizon. "I am in trouble--I am in trouble," I heard always above the roar of the train, above the shrill whistle of the engine, as it rounded a curve, above the thin, drawling voices of my fellow-passengers, disputing a question in politics. "I am in trouble," ran the words. "What trouble? What trouble? What trouble?" I repeated passionately, while my teeth bit into my cigar, and the flame went out. "So George hasn't let her out of his sight for two years, and I did not know it. For two years! And in these two years how much have I seen of her--of Sally, my wife? We have been living separate lives under the same roof, and when she asked me for bread, I have given her--pearls!" A passion of remorse gripped me at the throat like the spring of a beast. Pearls for bread, and that to Sally--to my wife, whom I loved! The melancholy landscape at which I looked appeared to divide and dissolve, and she came back to me, not as I had last seen her, weighed down by the furs which were too heavy, but in her blue gingham apron with the jagged burn on her wrist, and the patient, divine smile hovering about her lips. If she went from me now, it would be always the Sally of that year of poverty, of suffering, that I had lost. In the future she would haunt me, not in her sea-green gown, with the jewels on her bosom, but in her gingham apron with the sleeves rolled back from her reddened arms and the jagged scar from the burn disfiguring her flesh. "I'll see him in hell, before I'll vote for him!" called out a voice at my back, in a rage. The train pulled into the little wayside station of Riverview, and getting out, I started on the walk of two miles through the flat, brown fields to the house. The road was heavy with mud, and it was like ploughing to keep straight on in the single red-clay furrow which the wheels of passing wagons had left. All was desolate, all was deserted, and the only living things I saw between the station and the house were a few lonely sheep browsing beside a stream, and the brown-winged birds that flew, with wet plumage, across the road.