It would be impossible for her to remove that barricade without assistance; and then, how could she be sure that the door itself was not nailed up, or secured in some way?
It was a delicious sunny afternoon, and she could picture the lonely old man sitting in his circle of greenery beside the dial, which for him had registered so many dreary and solitary hours, waiting for the little ray of social sunlight which her presence shed over his monotonous life.

He had told her that she was like the sunshine to him--better than sunshine--and she had promised not to forsake him.

She pictured him waiting, with his hand clasped upon his crutch-stick, his chin resting upon his hands, his eyes poring on the ground, as she had seen him for the first time.

And as the stable clock chimed the quarters he would begin to think himself abandoned, forgotten; if, indeed, he took any count of the passage of time of which she was not sure.

His mind seemed to have sunk into a condition which was between dreaming and waking, a state to which the outside world seemed only half real--a phase of being in which there was neither past nor future, only the insufferable monotony of an everlasting _now_.
Pity is so near akin to love that Mary, in her deep compassion for this lonely, joyless, loveless existence, felt a regard which was almost affection for this strange old man, whose very name was unknown to her.
True that there was much in his countenance and manner which was sinister and repellant.