ath, stepped into the hall of the house.

For thirty years he had been accustomed to enter the little house with
his mind ready to receive its interior of desks and shelves and safes
and files. To-day, quite unexpectedly, as he opened the door, the thing
that was in his mind was a hall stair with a red carpet, and a parlour
adjoining with figured stuff at the windows and a coal fire in the
stove.... And thirty-five years ago it had been that way, when he and
his wife and child had lived in the little house where his business was
then just starting at a machine set up in the woodshed. As his project
had grown and his factory had arisen in the neighbouring lots, the
family had moved farther up in the town. Remembrance had been divorced
from this place for decades. To-day, without warning, it waited for him
on the threshold.

He had asked his bookkeeper to meet him there, but the man had not yet
arrived. So Ebenezer himself kindled a fire in the rusty office stove,
in the room where the figured curtains had been. The old account books
that he wanted were not here on the shelves, nor in the cupboards of the
cold adjoining rooms. They dated so far back that they had been filed
away upstairs. He had not been upstairs in years, and his first impulse
was to send his bookkeeper, when he should appear. But this, after all,
was not Ebenezer's way; and he went up the stairs himself.

Each upper room was like some one unconscious in stupor or death, and
still as distinct in personality as if in some ancient activity. There
was the shelf he had put up in their room, the burned place on the floor
where he had tipped over a lamp, tattered shreds of the paper she had
hung to surprise him, the little storeroom which they had cleared out
for Malcolm when he was old enough, and whose door had had to be kept
closed because innumerable uncaged birds lived there....

When he had gone through the piles of account books in a closet and
those he sought were not found among them, he remembered the trunkful up
in the tiny loft. He let down from the passage ceiling the ladder he had
once hung there, and climbed up to the little roof recess.

Light entered through four broken panes of skylight. It fell in a faint
rug on the dusty floor. The roof sloped sharply, and the trunks and
boxes had been pressed back to the rim of the place. Ebenezer put his
hands out, groping. They touched an edge of something that swayed. He
laid hold of it and drew it