re potent
upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in
the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and
individual agony. It seemed incredible that all this malice and injury
had been wrought upon the room by those who had called it for a time
their home; and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving
blindly, the resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled
their wrath. A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.

The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file, soft-shod,
through his mind, while there drifted into the room furnished sounds
and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent,
slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold, the rattling of
dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a banjo tinkled
with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared
intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he
breathed the breath of the house--a dank savour rather than a smell--a
cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the
reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.

Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the strong,
sweet odour of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of wind with
such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost seemed a living
visitant. And the man cried aloud: "What, dear?" as if he had been
called, and sprang up and faced about. The rich odour clung to him and
wrapped him around. He reached out his arms for it, all his senses for
the time confused and commingled. How could one be peremptorily called
by an odour? Surely it must have been a sound. But, was it not the sound
that had touched, that had caressed him?

"She has been in this room," he cried, and he sprang to wrest from
it a token, for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that
had belonged to her or that she had touched. This enveloping scent of
mignonette, the odour that she had loved and made her own--whence came
it?

The room had been but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the
flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins--those discreet,
indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of
mood and uncommunicative of tense. These he ignored, conscious of their
triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers of the dresser he
came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged