"They must have loved this room!" I said to him one evening. It was during the black rains of February--Dean and I with our chairs to the fire, waiting for the Eastern mail. The night watchman's orders were to stop for it if the trains were anywhere near on time. At this storm season the Westbound was frequently behind and the road to town a quagmire. We never looked for Fahey--he was the man I found there as night watchman--before eight o'clock. It had rained and snowed off and on since the month began. In the dark, low rooms the fire burned all day. The dining-room, which had blue-green walls in imitation of Flemish tapestry and weathered-oak furniture, was darkened still more by the pines that gave a cloistered look to the view from our back windows into a small, square court, high-walled and spread with pine-needles. The rooms we used were two small ones united, done in white and yellow and with slim curtains which we could crush back upon the rods; but even there one could not see to read by daylight. This continuous, arctic gloom added, no doubt, to the melancholy spell of the house, which nevertheless charmed me, and held me almost with a sense of impalpable presences sharing with Joshua and me our intimate, wistful seclusion. If I was happy, in a luxuriously mournful sort of way, I knew that he was not--that he grieved persistently over something that cast a greyness over his thoughts in keeping with the atmosphere. I knew that he knew without any names whom I meant whenever I spoke of _they_. "Yes, they loved it," he said, answering my exclamation. "They made it, somehow, as character is said to shape its own set of features." "Had they lived here long?" "For a mine house, yes. It was, of course, a home. They had no other." "A happy one?" I ventured. "Can any one be called happy who has the gift of strong feeling, and two children at stake, in this world?" I had never heard him speak with such bitterness. "But to have any one to feel for--that is life," I said. "I wish I had more of it myself." "Life, then, is not happiness." I left him the last word, and sitting so, both silent, we heard a screen-door at the kitchen-end blow to with a bang and a clatter of tinware that sent the blood to my face in wrath. I said something--about Jim and his fly-doors (Jim believed that flies or their ghosts besieged that house all winter)--when the old heathen himself came boiling into the room like a whole United States mail service delayed. "Hoo! Heap bad ou'si'! Heap snow!" he panted, wiping drops from the lock of the mail-pouch with his apron. My wrath increased, because once more Fahey had got past the front door with the mail, whereas each night I had promised myself to waylay him and change his roundabout method of delivery. "If I live till tomorrow," I said crossly, "I'll see if he can't climb those steps and hand us the bag himself." Jim stood listening. "We might be at dinner," Joshua suggested.