ghosts rose and faced the woman as she stepped into the room where they had moved in life, the room with its loveliness marred by two long tables covered with green oilcloth, by four rows of cheap chairs, by rows and rows of boxes on shelves where soft and bright and dark colors of books had glowed.  She felt often that she should explain matters to the room, should tell the walls which had sheltered peace and hospitality that she had consecrated them to yet higher service.  Never for one instant, while her soul ached for the familiar setting, had she regretted its sacrifice.  That her soul did ache made it worth while.

And the women gathered for this branch Red Cross organization, her neighbors on the edge of the great city, wives and daughters and mothers of clerks, and delivery-wagon drivers, and icemen, and night-watchmen, women who had not known how to take their part in the war work in the city or had found it too far to go, these came to her house gladly and all found pleasure in her beautiful room.  That made it a joy to give it up to them.  She stood in the doorway, feeling an emphasis in the quiet of the July afternoon because of the forty voices which had lately gone out of the sunshiny silence, of the forty busy figures in long, white aprons and white, sweeping veils, the tiny red cross gleaming over the forehead of each one, each face lovely in the uniform of service, all oddly equalized and alike under their veils and crosses.  She spoke aloud as she tossed out her hands to the room: 

“War will be over some day, and you will be our own again, but forever holy because of this.  You will be a room of history when you go to Brock—­”

Brock!  Would Brock ever come home to the room, to this place which he loved?  Brock, in France!  She turned sharply and went out through the long hall and across the terrace, and sat down where the steps dropped to the garden, on the broad top step, with her head against the pillar of the balustrade.  Above her the smell of box in a stone vase on the pillar punctured the mild air with its definite, reminiscent fragrance.  Box is a plant of antecedents of sentiment, of memories.  The woman inhaling its delicate sharpness, was caught back into days past.  She considered, in rapid jumps of thought, events, episodes, epochs.  The day Brock was born, on her own twentieth birthday, up-stairs where the rosy chintz curtains blew now out of the window; the first day she had come down to the terrace—­it was June—­and the baby lay in his bassinet by the balustrade in that spot—­she looked at the spot—­the baby, her big Brock, a bundle of flannel and fine, white stuff in lacy frills of the bassinet.  And she loved him; she remembered how she had loved that baby, how, laughing at herself, she had whispered silly words over the stolid, pink head; how the girl’s heart of her had all but burst with the astonishing new tide of a feeling which seemed the greatest of which she was capable.  Yet it was a small thing to the way she loved Brock now.  A vision came of little Hugh, three years younger, and the two toddling about the terrace together, Hugh always Brock’s satellite and adorer, as was fitting; less sturdy, less daring than Brock, yet ready to go anywhere if only the older baby led.  She thought of the day when Hugh, four years old, had taken fright at a black log among the bushes under the trees.