At the time Mary had noted nothing of these things; now she saw them all, as for the first time, in minute detail, while slowly she went up the stair and through the narrowed ways, and heard the same wind that raved alike about the new grave and the old house, into which latter, for all the bales banked against the walls, it found many a chink of entrance.

The smell of the linen, of the blue cloth, and of the brown paper--things no longer to be handled by those tender, faithful hands--was dismal and strange, and haunted her like things that intruded, things which she had done with, and which yet would not go away.

Everything had gone dead, as it seemed, had exhaled the soul of it, and retained but the odor of its mortality.

If for a moment a thing looked the same as before, she wondered vaguely, unconsciously, how it could be.

The passages through the merchandise, left only wide enough for one, seemed like those she had read of in Egyptian tombs and pyramids: a sarcophagus ought to be waiting in her chamber.