s tranquil security, must have
been! One wondered what Miss Eleanor had felt, when she knew she had to
die, to pass out into the unknown dark out of a world so tender, so
familiar, so peaceful; and what had poor Miss Jackson made of it, when
she was left alone? She must have found it all very puzzling, very
dreary. And yet, in the dim past, perhaps one or both of them, had had
dreams of a fuller life, had fancied that something more than
tenderness had looked out of the eyes of a man; well, it had come to
nothing, whatever it might have been; and the two old ladies had
settled down, perhaps with some natural repining, to their unexciting,
contented life, the day filled with little duties and pleasures, the
nights with innocent sleep. It had not been a selfish life--they had
been good to the poor, the maid told me; and in old days they had often
had their nephews and nieces to stay with them. But those children had
grown up and gone out into the world, and no longer cared to return to
the dull little house with its precise ways, and the fidgety love that
had once embraced them.

The whole thing seemed a mysterious mixture of purposelessness and
contentment. Rumours of wars, social convulsions, patriotic hopes,
great ideas, had swept on their course outside, and had never stirred
the drowsy current of life behind the garden walls. The sisters had
lived, sweetly, perhaps, and softly, like trees in some sequestered
woodland, hardly recognising their own gentle lapse of strength and
activity.

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