r to call out. He must steal into his house, as he had
stolen out of it.

One of the windows yielded; the long glass door gave inward, and he
stepped on the carpetless floor of the library. Then the fact of the
change that must have passed upon the whole house enforced itself, and
he felt a passionate desire to face and appropriate the change in every
detail. He lit one of the little taper matches that he had with him,
and, hollowing his hands around it, let its glimmer show him the
desolation of the dismantled and abandoned rooms. He passed through the
doors set wide between library and drawing-room and dining-room and
hall; and then from his dying taper he lit another, and mounted the
stairs. He had no need to seek his daughter's rooms to satisfy himself
that the whole place was empty; they were gone; but he had a fantastic
expectation that in his own room he might find himself. There was
nothing there, either; it was as if he were a ghost come back in search
of the body it had left behind; any one that met him, he thought, might
well be more frightened than he; and yet he did not lose the sense of
risk to himself.

He had an expectation, born of long custom, and persisting in spite of
the nakedness of the place otherwise, that he should see the pictured
face of his wife, where it had looked so mercifully at him that last
night from the portrait above the mantel. He sighed lightly to find it
gone; her chair was gone from the bay-window, where he had stood to gaze
his last over the possessions he was abandoning. He let his little taper
die out by the hearth, and then crept toward the glimmer of the window,
and looked out again. The conservatories and the dairies and the barns
showed plain in the gray of the moonless, starless night; in the
coachman's quarters a little point of light appeared for a moment
through the window, and then vanished.

Northwick knew from this that the place was inhabited; unless some
homeless tramp like himself was haunting it, and it went through his
confusion that he must speak to Newton, and caution him about tramps
sleeping in the barns anywhere; they might set them on fire. His mind
reverted to his actual condition, and he wondered how long he could come
and go as a vagrant without being detected. If it were not for the
action against vagrants which he had urged upon the selectmen the summer
before, he might now come and go indefinitely. But he was not to blame;
it was because Mrs. Mor