He told her how she might stay certain creditors and hold the house for a short time. “Until you can look about you a little,” he said. He had taken his hat from the table and had placed the memoranda on the piano. She might rent a part of the house, retaining a part of it for herself, he suggested. “Until you get used to things and can look about you a little.” She had already floated far from the hour and the interview in her apathy, in the numbness following the acceptance of the disclosures. He would give her any advice he could, he said; she might always apply to him. Apply for what? she wondered, and she closed the house door, looking intently at the door-frame, at the latch, at the baseboard and the floor, seeing them for the first time, seeing them as her possessions. Horace did not return from Paducah. Time passed. He wrote once hurriedly asking her to send his clothing, or again, much later, he expressed affection and said that he had entered a law firm. In his final letter he said, “My practice needs new life and this city offers a splendid field. I shall start life anew. I shall grow younger every day in this new field. The broad river spreads out before me as I pen these lines.” She walked through the house day after day, her house, experiencing ownership, making certain her knowledge of the place through which she had moved since first she could remember. She saw the stairway intently each time she mounted it, and saw the cabinets where the Indian hatchets and flints lay. She owned the house with a deep passion, possessed it, brick laid on brick in the chimney, the sagging floor of the upper gallery, the upper chambers. She had rented a part of it to a small family, retaining the parlor and the chamber above, and she had her meals at the renters’ table. Frank looked at her complacently now across the space of the parlor. She saw the deeply subordinated admiration in his eyes which had their advice from his life design. He would sit at ease in his chair beside the lamp, Albert’s place, and listen to her playing, more at ease now that Albert and Conway were gone. His large, rugged, unbalanced face induced a thought of solid strength, of simplicity. “You could work him out by a formula,” she thought, as she saw him appropriate her music to his hour of relaxation. He had an office in the court square of the town and his talk was of wills, deeds, farms, contracts, or foreclosures, unless he remembered to quote from his favorite poets. He remembered the poets often. As a formula he sat now, out before the walls of the parlor, detached from her determination to keep her house, her inheritance.