omething about an empty room, empty except of memories, but
containing nothing besides, no materialities, no certainties as to
the future, which is intimidating to one who stops and thinks. Harry
Edgham was not, generally speaking, of the sort who stop to think;
but now he did. The look of youth faded from his face. Instead of the
joy and triumph which had filled his heart and made it young again,
came remembrance of the other woman, and something else, which
resembled terror and dread. For the first time he deliberated whether
he was about to do a wise thing: for the first time, the image of Ida
Slome's smiling beauty, which was ever evident to his fancy, produced
in him something like doubt and consternation. He looked about the
room, and remembered the old pieces of furniture which had that day
been carried away. He looked at the places where they had stood. Then
he remembered his dead wife, as he had never remembered her before,
with an anguish of loss. He said to himself that if he only had her
back, even with her faded face and her ready tongue, that old,
settled estate would be better for him than this joy, which at once
dazzled and racked him. Suddenly the man, as he stood there, put his
hands before his face; he was weeping like a child. That which Maria
had done, instead of awakening wrath, had aroused a pity for himself
and for her, which seemed too great to be borne. For the instant, the
dead triumphed over the living.

Then Harry took up the lamp and went to his own room. He set the lamp
on the dresser, and looked at his face, with the rays thrown upward
upon it, very much as Maria had done the night of her mother's death.
When he viewed himself in the looking-glass, he smiled involuntarily;
the appearance of youth returned. He curled his mustache and moved
his head this way and that. He thought about some new clothes which
he was to have. He owned to himself, with perfect ingenuousness, that
he was, in his way, as a man, as good-looking as Ida herself.
Suddenly he remembered how Abby had looked when she was a young girl
and he had married her; he had not compared himself so favorably with
her. The image of his dead wife, as a young girl, was much fairer in
his mind than that of Ida Slome.

"There's no use talking, Abby was handsomer than Ida when she was
young," he said to himself, as he began to undress. He went to sleep
thinking of Abby as a young girl, but when once asleep he dreamed of
Ida Slome.