they had had no company.  Yes, what a woefully bewildering thing death swooping down into that quiet household, with all its tranquil security, must have been!  One wondered what Miss Eleanor had felt, when she knew she had to die, to pass out into the unknown dark out of a world so tender, so familiar, so peaceful; and what had poor Miss Jackson made of it, when she was left alone?  She must have found it all very puzzling, very dreary.  And yet, in the dim past, perhaps one or both of them, had had dreams of a fuller life, had fancied that something more than tenderness had looked out of the eyes of a man; well, it had come to nothing, whatever it might have been; and the two old ladies had settled down, perhaps with some natural repining, to their unexciting, contented life, the day filled with little duties and pleasures, the nights with innocent sleep.  It had not been a selfish life—­they had been good to the poor, the maid told me; and in old days they had often had their nephews and nieces to stay with them.  But those children had grown up and gone out into the world, and no longer cared to return to the dull little house with its precise ways, and the fidgety love that had once embraced them.

The whole thing seemed a mysterious mixture of purposelessness and contentment.  Rumours of wars, social convulsions, patriotic hopes, great ideas, had swept on their course outside, and had never stirred the drowsy current of life behind the garden walls.  The sisters had lived, sweetly, perhaps, and softly, like trees in some sequestered woodland, hardly recognising their own gentle lapse of strength and activity.

And now the whole thing was over for good.  Curious and indifferent people came, tramped about the house, pronounced it old-fashioned and inconvenient.  I could not do that myself; the place was brimful of the pathetic evidences of what had been.  Soon, no doubt, the old house would wear a different guise—­it would be renovated and restored, the furniture would drift away to second-hand shops, the litter would be thrown out upon the rubbish-heap.  New lives, new relationships would spring up; children would be born, boys would play, lovers would embrace, sufferers would lie musing, men and women would die in those refurbished rooms.  Everything would drift onwards, and the lives to whom each corner, each stair, each piece of furniture had meant so much, would become a memory first, and then fade into nothingness.  Where and what were the two old ladies now?  Were they gone out utterly, like an extinguished flame? were they in some new home of tranquil peace?  Were they adjusting themselves with a sense of timid impotence—­those slender, tired spirits—­to new and bewildering conditions?

The old, dull house called to me that day with a hundred faint voices and tremulous echoes.  I could make nothing of it; for though it swept the strings of my heart with a ghostly music, it seemed to have no certain message for me, but the message of oblivion and silence.