The ride home was made mainly in silence. "Oh, the splendid silence!" the woman kept saying in her heart. "Oh, the splendid moonlight, the marvelous radiance!" Everywhere a heavenly serenity--not a footstep, not a bell, not a cry, not a cracking tree--nothing but vivid light, white snow dappled and lined with shadows, and trees etched against a starlit sky. Splendor of light and sheen and shadow. Wide wastes of snow so white the stumps stood like columns of charcoal. A night of Nature's making when she is tired of noise and blare of color. And in the midst of it stood the camps and the reek of obscenity, foul odors, and tobacco smoke, to which a tortured soul must return. IV. The following Saturday afternoon, as Ridgeley and Field entered the office, Williams rose to meet them. He looked different; finer some way, Field imagined. At any rate, he was perfectly sober. He was freshly shaven, and though his clothes were rough, he looked like a man of education. His manner was cold and distant. "I'd like to be paid off, Mr. Ridgeley," he said. "I guess what's left of my pay will take me out of this." "Where do you propose to go?" Ridgeley said kindly. Williams must have perceived his kindliness, for he answered: "I'm going home to my wife. I am going to try it once more." After Williams went out Field said, "I wonder if he'll do it?" "Oh, I shouldn't wonder. I've seen men brace up just as mysteriously as that and stay right by their resolutions. I thought he didn't look like a common lumber Jack when he came in." "Oh, how happy his wife will be!" Mrs. Field cried when she heard of Williams's resolution. "She'll save him yet." "Well, I don't know; depends on what kind of a woman she is." THE OWNER OF THE MILL FARM. Beyond his necessity, a tired man is not apt to be polite. This Mrs. Miner had generalized from long experience with her husband. She knew at a distance, by the way he wore his hat when he came in out of the field, whether he was in a peculiarly savage mood, or only in his usual state of sullen indifference. As he came in out of the barn on this spring day, he turned to look up at the roof with a curse. Something had angered him. He did not stop to comb his hair after washing at the pump, but came into the neat kitchen and surlily took a seat at the table. Mrs. Miner, a slender little woman, quite ladylike in appearance, had the dinner all placed in steaming abundance upon the table, and the children, sitting side by side, watched their father in silence. There was an air of foreboding, of apprehension, over them all, as if they feared some brutal outbreak on his part. He placed his elbows on the table. His sleeves were rolled up, displaying his red and much sunburned arms. He wore no coat, and his face was sullen, and held, besides, a certain vicious quality, like that of a bad-tempered dog.