try hard to make things nice for you,
and the people really are lovely. You mustn't feel as if things are
altogether gloomy, George. I know everything's going to turn out all
right. You're young and strong and you have a good mind and I'm sure--"
she hesitated--"I'm sure your mother's watching over you, Georgie.
Good-night, dear."

"Good-night, Aunt Fanny."

His voice had a strangled sound in spite of him; but she seemed not to
notice it, and he heard her go to her own room and lock herself in with
bolt and key against burglars. She had said the one thing she should
not have said just then: "I'm sure your mother's watching over you,
Georgie." She had meant to be kind, but it destroyed his last chance for
sleep that night. He would have slept little if she had not said it, but
since she had said it, he could not sleep at all. For he knew that it
was true--if it could be true--and that his mother, if she still lived
in spirit, would be weeping on the other side of the wall of silence,
weeping and seeking for some gate to let her through so that she could
come and "watch over him."

He felt that if there were such gates they were surely barred: they
were like those awful library doors downstairs, which had shut her in to
begin the suffering to which he had consigned her.

The room was still Isabel's. Nothing had been changed: even the
photographs of George, of the Major, and of "brother George" still stood
on her dressing-table, and in a drawer of her desk was an old picture of
Eugene and Lucy, taken together, which George had found, but had slowly
closed away again from sight, not touching it. To-morrow everything
would be gone; and he had heard there was not long to wait before the
house itself would be demolished. The very space which tonight was still
Isabel's room would be cut into new shapes by new walls and floors and
ceilings; yet the room would always live, for it could not die out of
George's memory. It would live as long as he did, and it would always be
murmurous with a tragic, wistful whispering.

And if space itself can be haunted, as memory is haunted, then some
time, when the space that was Isabel's room came to be made into the
small bedrooms and "kitchenettes" already designed as its destiny, that
space might well be haunted and the new occupants come to feel that some
seemingly causeless depression hung about it--a wraith of the passion
that filled it throughout the last night that George Minafer sp