behind the glass
looked almost fresh. The latticed windows between had all been boarded
up from within. The house was not to be let perish soon.

I did not want to go nearer to it; yet I did go nearer, step by step,
across the wilderness, right up to the edge of the veranda itself, and
within a yard of the front-door.

I stood looking at that door. I had never noticed it in the old days,
for then it had always stood open. But it asserted itself now, master of
the threshold.

It was a narrow door--narrow even for its height, which did not exceed
mine by more than two inches or so; a door that even when it was freshly
painted must have looked mean. How much meaner now, with its paint all
faded and mottled, cracked and blistered! It had no knocker, not even a
slit for letters. All that it had was a large-ish key-hole. On this my
eyes rested; and presently I moved to it, stooped down to it, peered
through it. I had a glimpse of--darkness impenetrable.

Strange it seemed to me, as I stood back, that there the Room was,
the remembered Room itself, separated from me by nothing but this
unremembered door...and a quarter of a century, yes. I saw it all, in
my mind's eye, just as it had been: the way the sunlight came into it
through this same doorway and through the lattices of these same four
windows; the way the little bit of a staircase came down into it, so
crookedly yet so confidently; and how uneven the tiled floor was, and
how low the rafters were, and how littered the whole place was with
books brought in from his den by William, and how bright with flowers
brought in by Mary from her garden. The rafters, the stairs, the tiles,
were still existing, changeless in despite of cobwebs and dust and
darkness, all quite changeless on the other side of the door, so near to
me. I wondered how I should feel if by some enchantment the door slowly
turned on its hinges, letting in light. I should not enter, I felt, not
even look, so much must I hate to see those inner things lasting when
all that had given to them a meaning was gone from them, taken away from
them, finally. And yet, why blame them for their survival? And how
know that nothing of the past ever came to them, revisiting, hovering?
Something--sometimes--perhaps? One knew so little. How not be tender to
what, as it seemed to me, perhaps the dead loved?

So strong in me now was the wish to see again all those things, to touch
them and, as it were, commune with them, a