And now the whole thing was over for good. Curious and indifferent people came, tramped about the house, pronounced it old-fashioned and inconvenient. I could not do that myself; the place was brimful of the pathetic evidences of what had been. Soon, no doubt, the old house would wear a different guise--it would be renovated and restored, the furniture would drift away to second-hand shops, the litter would be thrown out upon the rubbish-heap. New lives, new relationships would spring up; children would be born, boys would play, lovers would embrace, sufferers would lie musing, men and women would die in those refurbished rooms. Everything would drift onwards, and the lives to whom each corner, each stair, each piece of furniture had meant so much, would become a memory first, and then fade into nothingness. Where and what were the two old ladies now? Were they gone out utterly, like an extinguished flame? were they in some new home of tranquil peace? Were they adjusting themselves with a sense of timid impotence--those slender, tired spirits--to new and bewildering conditions? The old, dull house called to me that day with a hundred faint voices and tremulous echoes. I could make nothing of it; for though it swept the strings of my heart with a ghostly music, it seemed to have no certain message for me, but the message of oblivion and silence. I was sorry, as I went away, to leave the poor maidservant to her lonely and desolate memories. She had to leave her comfortable kitchen and her easy routine, for new duties and new faces, and I could see that she anticipated the change with sad dismay. It seemed to me in that hour as though the cruelty and the tenderness of the world were very mysteriously blended--there was no lack of tenderness in the old house with its innumerable small associations, its sheltered calm. And then suddenly the stroke must fall, and fall upon lives whose very security and gentleness seemed to have been so ill a preparation for sterner and darker things. It would have been more loving, one thought, either to have made the whole fabric more austere, more precarious from the first; or else to have bestowed a deep courage and a fertile hope, a firmer endurance, rather than to have confronted lives so frail and delicate with the terrors of the vast unknown. April 8, 1890.