Very soon now the old man would be here, and the room that had once been his for so long would be his again. He would find things a good deal changed, it was true, but how much for the better, after all! No doubt the place had been well enough once, years and years ago, perhaps, when he was first wed, but it had been only a poor spot later on. It had had a neglected look from the outside, and the fields and hedges seemed to ask for a hand. At the last, of course, it had been a desolate place, indeed.... By accident, as it happened, she had seen the room before he left, and the desolation of it still haunted her mind. The old wooden bedstead had been rickety all through, and there was never a mat on the bare, unvarnished boards. In the quilt grown thin as a rag there was a jagged tear, and in each of the ceiling-corners a spider had spun a web. The once blue-washed walls had faded a dirty grey, and the plaster was crumbling away where the damp had driven in. The windows had broken hasps, and one had a broken pane; all dim they were, mysterious with crusted salt ... and by the bed had stood a pair of old woman’s shoes. She remembered the shoes because they had been his wife’s. It was weeks, she remembered—months—after she was dead. A dismal room indeed it had seemed to the girl, a forlorn place thoroughly in tune with a forlorn human old age. She remembered how she laid hands on it, then as now, mending the quilt and fetching the spiders from their homes, spending a lusty scrubbing on the floor. Even then she had had a vision of what she would some day make of the place, plotting and planning and laughing as she toiled. She had never put her head inside that room, it seemed, but some web of contrival at once began to spin. Of course it was not exactly as she had planned, because every creation meddles with the tools, but it was near enough to satisfy her, nevertheless. It was inevitable somehow ... intended ... definitely right. It seemed inevitable, too, that she herself should be here, although she had questioned and delayed her fate so long. She felt sure, when she looked back, that she had known it to be inevitable all the time; that just the same personal interest had gone to that far-away putting of things to rights. But she had not been ready for Thomas, just then, and the future had had to take care of itself. Thomas’s father, however, had not been able to care for himself. In the midst of her indecision he had had to quit. The trouble had gone further than just an unswept room....