"It was nothing much," he said, frowning. "But, mother, what horrible things these are!" He pointed with a sharp thrust of his finger to the trinkets on the floor. "She used them, mother. She had them about her every day. She handled them, and used them for her momentary purposes and necessities and there is no trace of her on any one of them."
"John, John!" Mrs. Morrison appealed to him with an outstretched hand, for he spoke with a kind of passion that hurt her like an impropriety.
He went on as though he had heard nothing. "Look at this thing," he said. "It was the silver mirror. She used it a dozen times a day. Her face was bright in it a thousand times—when she put up her hair, and when she let it down in a cascade over her shoulders. She was beautiful, and it was the companion of her beauty. And—yet it's empty now, as empty as her bed, as empty as all this stricken house. As though she had never lived, mother—as though there had been no Hilda."
He dropped the mirror beside him, and rose from his chair, to pace up and down the room with quick, nervous strides.
Mrs. Morrison rose too. "John, dear," she said, stopping him with outstretched hands, "don't talk like that. We know better—you and I. The mirror can tell us nothing, nor any of those things you are torturing yourself with. She gave them nothing, my boy; it was for us she lived, not them. Our love, dear, and the pain of our loss, and all our memories; these are Hilda's witnesses. They remain to prove her to us and fulfil the beauty and goodness of her life. Don't speak as though Hilda had been wasted on us, dear."
"Wasted!" He started at the word. "Wasted! Oh God!"
She took him by the arm and drew him back to his chair by the fire. But even as he sat down he glanced again over his shoulder at the door. To all her entreaties to go to bed he remained obdurate.
"Do you know that I am very tired, John?" she said at last.
He looked up quickly. "Then you go to bed, mother," he urged. "I—I wish you would. I'd like to be alone for a little.
"If I leave you, will you promise you will not stay long?" she asked.