"For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven." However, on the third reading he shut up his book, keeping three bunches of pressed flowers inside to mark the place, and half humorously and half with the irritability of old age, sighed: "I don't feel as ef I could stand it a inch longer. What mortal use is there in me tryin' to make myself at all comfortable this evenin' with that noise eternally pesterin' me? Seems like it has always been my experience a man has got to give in first an' last."
Then wrapped in the faded splendour of a once gorgeous silk dressing-gown the old man disappeared into his bedroom, returning with a shawl crossed over his shoulders and a knitted muffler tied about his head. On opening his door he listened again for a moment, but, as the crying had not ceased, waded across his yard through the snow in his carpet slippers until he knocked with his big blue-veined old hand hard against the locked back door of a cottage adjoining his.
At first there was no answer except a continuing of the sniffling, snuffling noises which only made the visitor rap more vehemently, when at length the door opened and there stood a woman holding a lantern above her head.
"Uncle Ambrose Thompson, what kin you want o' me this time o' night?" she asked; "it's goin' on nine o'clock! You ain't sick?"
Uncle Ambrose shook his head, surveying his neighbour sympathetically, but oh, so disparagingly! She was so plainly an old-time old maid, flat in the chest and angular, a hard and bony structure, with a face that was equally barren save that its desert waste had lately been swept by a storm.
"No, I ain't sick, child," Uncle Ambrose answered, "but you are—heartsick. And what's more it seems likely I can't stand that noise you keep on a-makin'. You come over and set by my kitchen fire a space and kind er talk things out with me. I reckon I ain't altogether lost my soothin' powers!"
Before his glowing fire the old host comfortably placed two rocking chairs side by side. For the past seven years Ambrose Thompson had been a widower for the third time and, since Peachy's death, having come back home from the Red Farm, had lived all alone in his once rose-coloured cottage, looked after only by his neighbours.
Picking up a crazy quilt cushion from his chair, the old man surveyed it tenderly. "This was my Em'ly's make," he explained; "seems, 'Lizabeth Horton, that you and me 're most like strangers, havin' lived side by side only a little piece like seven years. Em'ly she was the second of my three wives." And then thoughtfully passing his hand backward over his high bald crown, Uncle Ambrose smiled in a kind of slow and puzzled fashion.
"No, now I've done mixed things up a bit; I'm gittin' a little oncertain these days. Em'ly wasn't never the sewin' one," he continued, "besides, this crazy quiltin' business was most too new fashioned fer my Em'ly. I kin recollect now bringin' that sofy cushion in from the farm, so it must 'a' been Peachy's. Funny how I keep puttin' everything on to Em'ly these days!"
Then seeing that his caller's red-rimmed eyes had been yearning toward the coffee pot at the back of his stove, the old man put it down before her with a nicked but brightly flowered cup and saucer, and afterward, settling himself in his own place, peacefully began smoking, finding a kind of unholy joy in the old maid's horrified glances about his untidy but nobly littered kitchen.