my own attitude; I was going away in the morning,
and I had, in a sense, no duties toward the place. The magazines of last
fall lay on the tables, the newspapers of last fall lay beside them. The
dust of last fall was, doubtless, in the closets and on the floors. It did
not matter. For though I was the mistress of the house, I was for the
moment even more its guest, and guests do not concern themselves with such
things as these.

If it had been really an empty house, I should have been obliged to think
of these things, for in an empty house the dust speaks and the house is
still, dumbly imprisoned in its own past. On the other hand, when a house
is filled with life, it is still, too; it is absorbed in its own present.
But when one sojourns in a house that is merely resting, full of the life
that has only for a brief season left it, ready for the life that is soon
to return--then one is in the midst of silences that are not empty and
hollow, but richly eloquent. The house is the link that joins and
interprets the living past and the living future.

Something of this I came to feel as I sat there in the wonderful
stillness. There were no house noises such as generally form the unnoticed
background of one's consciousness--the steps overhead, the distant voices,
the ticking of the clock, the breathing of the dog in the corner. Even the
mice and the chimney-swallows had not come back, and I missed the
scurrying in the walls and the flutter of wings in the chimney. The fire
purred low, now and then the wind sighed gently about the corner of the
"new part," and a loose door-latch clicked as the draught shook it. A
branch drew back and forth across a window-pane with the faintest squeak.
And little by little the old house opened its heart. All that it told me I
hardly yet know myself. It gathered up for me all its past, the past that
I had known and the past that I had not known. Time fell away. My own
importance dwindled. I seemed a very small part of the life of the
house--very small, yet wholly belonging to it. I felt that it absorbed me
as it absorbed the rest--those before and after me--for time was not.

There was the sound of slow wheels outside, the long roll of the
carriage-house door, and the trampling of hoofs on the flooring within.
Then the clinking of the lantern and the even tread of feet on the path
behind the house, a gust of raw snow-air--and the house fell silent so that
Jonathan might come in.

"Your sug