"His boots are full of snakes, if I am not mistaken—but truly a bad fellow. He must have been what we heard back by the cemetery."
"No. Not such a noise as that. That was a wailing cry. Perhaps—he surely cannot have had his hand on any human being. Let us hurry on. The devil must be hereabouts to-night."
The suburbs seemed again to be asleep. The wind came and went over the rickety homes, sparsely scattered, and its moaning was made more dismal by the long-drawn out howl of some sleepless cur.
At rare intervals a light gleamed from a window.
One window from which a light shone Gilbert Allison and his friend looked into that night, and somehow that window remained always open in the memory of each, with a bright light burning behind it.
It was a dreary little structure that stood close to the roadside, quite alone. The window was only a square hole, and the feeble light inside flickered as the wind blew through. There had been glass there once, no doubt, but that glass and many other cheap glass windows had gone into a better, richer piece of glass, and that hung in a respectable saloon.
Reflecting the decanters and red noses—and broken hearts? No! Ah, no! Their reflection would have injured the trade. They remained where the cheap glass had once been, and it was one of these hearts that Gilbert Allison, late of the firm of Allison, Russell & Joy, caught a glimpse of as he paused at the open window.
A woman sat on the floor in the middle of the room.
A woman of petrified misery. She gazed beyond the surrounding walls into the happy past, the mournful future—into Heaven and Hell, or somewhere.