the first year was out, she had ceased to see much of her husband, and a little later had ceased to see him altogether. It was fifteen years afterwards, when he had become the futile person I knew, that he had returned to her. As the coffin, bared of its covering of sickly-smell flowers, was lowered into the ugly, gaping grave, and the damp red earth rattled heavily on the lid with a hollow, brutal sound, I recalled the strange, white face, the watery blue eyes, the fixed smile, the soft, polite manner; but I was not in the least grieved to know I should never see them again. And when, a week or so later, I was once more in and out of the house just as of old, I had already ceased to think of him. Once or twice, passing the closed door of his room in the dusk, the thought of meeting his ghost, of hearing the tap, tap of his stick coming toward me down the long passage, gave me a momentary thrill; but even these poor tributes to his memory faded swiftly, passed into a total oblivion.
