after fumbling in his pocket for a latchkey, opened the front door.
A vista of well-ordered obscurity with shadowy trestle-like objects
against the walls, and an odor of chill decorum, as if of a damp but
respectable funeral, greeted him on entering. A faint light, like a cold
dawn, broke through the glass pane of a door leading to the kitchen.
Blandford paused in the mid-darkness and hesitated. Should he first go
to his wife in the back parlor, or pass silently through the kitchen,
open the back gate, and mercifully bestow his sweating beast in the
stable? With the reflection that an immediate conjugal greeting, while
his horse was still exposed to the fury of the blast in the street,
would necessarily be curtailed and limited, he compromised by quickly
passing through the kitchen into the stable yard, opening the gate,
and driving horse and vehicle under the shed to await later and more
thorough ministration. As he entered the back door, a faint hope that
his wife might have heard him and would be waiting for him in the hall
for an instant thrilled him; but he remembered it was Sunday, and that
she was probably engaged in some devotional reading or exercise.
He hesitatingly opened the back-parlor door with a consciousness of
committing some unreasonable trespass, and entered.

She was there, sitting quietly before a large, round, shining
centre-table, whose sterile emptiness was relieved only by a shaded lamp
and a large black and gilt open volume. A single picture on the
opposite wall--the portrait of an elderly gentleman stiffened over a
corresponding volume, which he held in invincible mortmain in his rigid
hand, and apparently defied posterity to take from him--seemed to offer
a not uncongenial companionship. Yet the greenish light of the shade
fell upon a young and pretty face, despite the color it extracted from
it, and the hand that supported her low white forehead over which
her full hair was simply parted, like a brown curtain, was slim and
gentle-womanly. In spite of her plain lustreless silk dress, in spite of
the formal frame of sombre heavy horsehair and mahogany furniture that
seemed to set her off, she diffused an atmosphere of cleanly grace and
prim refinement through the apartment. The priestess of this ascetic
temple, the femininity of her closely covered arms, her pink ears, and
a little serviceable morocco house-shoe that was visible lower down,
resting on the carved lion's paw that upheld the centr