two o'clock
Her disappointment amounted to actual physical pain . She found no comfort , as a wiser person might have done , in certain of Miss Delia 's expressions ; she only realized that her best friend and her most generous critic could find nothing good in what she had done . Her duty this afternoon was only to make up the mail for the down train ; then her time was her own till the next mail train came up at half-past five . At two o'clock she closed the office again and started on a long walk . She longed for the comfort of the solitary hillsides , where warm patches of sunlight lay at the foot of ragged stone walls , and there were long stretches of plain and meadow to be looked over , and rolling hills to comfort the soul . As she climbed a hill just before the place where a weedy untravelled road turned off from the highway leading between closely growing underbrush and stone walls , where now and then a shy bird rustled suddenly and invisibly among last year 's dried leaves , she saw three countrymen standing by the wayside and talking with as near an approach to earnestness as ever visits the colloquies of the ordinary unemotional New Englander . One of them held a copy of the `` Daily Chronicle , '' gesturing with it somewhat jerkily as he spoke .