Page:Rideout--Beached keels.djvu/164

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150
BEACHED KEELS

dimming the sunlight, was cool and dusky. There was the familiar, indefinable smell of home, and his heart sank lower as he recognized it. A single fly buzzed on the pane. Even to the dusty branch of red mountain ash berries hanging under the Gilderoy, everything was in order, as he had known it; except that the door into his mother's room—the only other room on the ground floor of the little house—now stood open. With a new and deeper reverence he went slowly in, and paused. Here again all was in order, as in the time that seemed so many years ago; here again were silence and the yellow dimness of muffled sunshine. In all the room the only moving thing was the black shadow-pattern of the woodbine leaves, quivering at the top of the white curtain. He was still calm as he drew near the table by the other window, at the end of the room. On it lay, as if just put down, some unfinished work of his mother's,—some knitting or other, neatly smoothed out, with the ends of the needles thrust carefully through the black ball. The tears springing to his eyes, he looked again, and