The house was a very large one, and while he bathed his face after his long sleep, I walked through the rooms, which seemed so empty that the noise of my feet made echoes as though a troop were following me. When I went into Mateel’s room, where I had left Jo sobbing on the bed on the dreadful night when his wife went away, I found it ready for her reception, as though she were expected to arrive at any time. The woman who kept the house, and who lived so near that she went home every night, had thrown all her woman’s ingenuity into making the room tasteful and pretty, as a compliment to her wretched employer, and it was aired and dusted as regularly as though it had been regularly occupied. All the articles of ornament and comfort prepared by Mateel while she had lived there were in their accustomed places, and her picture, which had been taken shortly after her marriage, had been made gay by the kindhearted housekeeper in a pretty frame for the pleasure of the master, should he ever come in to look at it. There were seven or eight rooms besides this one, and I thought that a man in the best of spirits would have been lonely to stay there without companions. When Jo joined me in the hall we went down stairs to supper, and after seeing that everything was at hand, the housekeeper left for home to prepare her husband’s supper, leaving us alone. On looking about I saw that Jo had been adding articles of furniture during his wife’s absence, as if to surprise and please her when she should finally return; and I have no doubt he was always expecting she would come back to-morrow, that fateful day which never arrives, though all of us expect so much of it. I think he believed every time he went to sleep that when he awakened she would be standing by his side, and from the miller and the housekeeper I learned that he turned quickly at every noise, expecting that it was the step of his returning wife. He never told me, but I believe that had she come back and said that she could not live without him they would have been much happier than they were before, and perhaps finished their lives in peace together. His life alone in the great house must have been a greater sorrow than his letter and the skeleton, and I think he would have consented to forget a great deal to avoid it.