He could see her palpable before him now: her
slender girlish figure, her bright eyes, her laughing mouth, her warm
brown hair curling round her forehead. Oh, how he had loved her. For
twelve years he had waited upon her, wooed her, hoped to win her. But
she had always said, 'No--I don't love you. I am very fond of you; I
love you as a friend; we all love you that way--my mother, my father,
my sisters. But I can't marry you.' However, she married no one else,
she loved no one else: and for twelve years he was an ever-welcome
guest in her father's house; and she would talk with him, play to him,
pity him; and he could hope. Then she died. He called one day, and
they said she was ill. After that there came a blank in his memory--a
gulf, full of blackness and redness, anguish and confusion; and then a
sort of dreadful sudden calm, when they told him she was dead.

He remembered standing in her room, after the funeral, with her
father, her mother, her sister Elizabeth. He remembered the pale
daylight that filled it, and how orderly and cold and forsaken it all
looked. And there was her bed, the bed she had died in; and there her
dressing-table, with her combs and brushes; and there her
writing-desk, her book-case. He remembered a row of medicine bottles
on the mantelpiece; he remembered the fierce anger, the hatred of
them, as if they were animate, that had welled up in his heart as he
looked at them, because they had failed to do their work.

'You will wish to have something that was hers, Richard,' her mother
said. 'What would you like?'

On her dressing-table there was a small looking-glass, in an ivory
frame. He asked if he might have that, and carried it away with him.
She had looked into it a thousand times, no doubt; she had done her
hair in it; it had reflected her, enclosed her, contained her. He
could almost persuade himself that something of her must remain in it.
To own it was like owning something of herself. He carried it home
with him, hugging it to his side with a kind of passion.

He had prized it, he prized it still, as his dearest treasure; the
looking-glass in which her face had been reflected a thousand times;
the glass that had contained her, known her; in which something of
herself, he felt, must linger. To handle it, look at it, into it,
behind it, was like holding a mystic communion with her; it gave him
an emotion that was infinitely sweet and bitter, a pain that was
dissolved in joy.

The gl