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.

“Yes,” he said.  “All right.  I’ll promise, mother.”

When she had left him he stood for a while in the centre of the floor, hands in pockets, his head drooping, in deep thought.  He was a spare man, lean and tall, bred to composure, and serenity.  Thus when there came a tragedy to overwhelm his training, he had few reserves; his propriety of demeanor lost, his soul was raw.  His very attitude, as he stood, was eloquent of pain and helplessness.  He had been married a little more than a year, and it seemed now as though that year stood vignetted on a broad border of sadness.

The fire rustled and clicked as the coals spent themselves.  He had a feeling of chill and faintness, and he went back slowly to his chair.  Seated there again, the silver toys were all round him, gleaming slyly at him with a sort of suggestiveness.  He packed up the mirror, once more, and looked into the oval glass at it.  He was feeling a little dizzy, these last days had burdened him heavily, and the afternoon had been a long stress of emotion.  Thus, for a space of minutes he sat, the glass before him, his eyes half closed.

It seemed to him that he must have dozed, for he sat up with the start of a man who arrests himself on the brink of sleep.  The mirror was in his hand.  He stared at it with wide eyes, thrusting it at arm’s length before him.  For in it he saw—­not a flicker of the firelight swaying on the wall, but a face that moved across from the door—­the face of his dead wife.