w he epitomizes all the cramped, pent-up emotions of the
starved inhabitants who have gone--all the passions that must have
so drearily burnt themselves out here, with nothing to note but the
shifting of the winds or the digging of some well! They who were
obliged, from sheer ennui, to create dramas out of their Puritan
prejudices. Can't you breathe contagion in the very atmosphere?
Julia, I've had enough of it; I'm glad we're going. If I stayed
here a month longer, I should get to feel as indigenous as that
gnarled old apple-tree; the ghosts of the soil would claim me."

She stood up and walked away from him across the gravel avenue, as
if doing so might help her to seize this occasion for what she had
decided at last to tell him. She realized that she must be quick,
that in another hour her parents' return might end this one good
opportunity for which she had longed and waited.

"Jack dear," she said, moving back toward him, seeing how her own
excitement was reflected in the way he, too, had arisen and taken
a few steps towards her, "to-morrow is our last day, and there's
something that we must talk about before we go."

His head was bowed, his eyes focused tensely up at hers, his arms
hanging beside him; the sensitive smile hovered more and more dimly
on his lips; his whole body swayed imperceptibly, like the beating
of a pulse.

"Jack," she got out, going still closer to him, "I want to show
you--Mrs. Eberdeen's room."

He would never quite realize the fullness of the shock it gave him;
no deliberate attack could have been so vulnerably aimed, and the
completeness of the blow was the greater for being one which he had
been unwittingly preparing all along to receive. The house looked
miles away; far over it three ducks flew southward.

On the landing above the broad part of the staircase they paused
a moment. Instead of going up the left branch, which led to Jack's
door, she took him to the right, where, at the head of the stairs,
there was another door directly opposite his. As soon as he saw it
he went forward quickly and turned the knob. It stuck; it was locked;
and rather timorously he stepped back to meet Julia's searching look
as she handed him a rusty old key.

The musty smell poured out on them like the damp from an opened vault.

She took his hand. They stepped across the threshold.

He saw the lithograph of the two kittens, age-worn and time-blurred,
still crooked on the wall beside the bureau; t