What eviction from that house would mean to her no one but he understood.

Since the day their little girl had died, nothing in the room that had been her playroom, bedroom, and nursery had been altered, nothing had been touched.

To his wife, somewhere in the house that wonderful, God-given child was still with them.

Not as a memory but as a real and living presence.

When at night the professor and his wife sat at either end of the study table, reading by the same lamp, he would see her suddenly lift her head, alert and eager, as though from the nursery floor a step had sounded, as though from the darkness a sleepy voice had called her.
And when they would be forced to move to lodgings in the town, to some students' boarding-house, though they could take with them their books, their furniture, their mutual love and comradeship, they must leave behind them the haunting presence of the child, the colored pictures she had cut from the Christmas numbers and plastered over the nursery walls, the rambler roses that with her own hands she had planted and that now climbed to her window and each summer peered into her empty room.
Outside Doctor Gilman's cottage, among the trees of the campus, paper lanterns like oranges aglow were swaying in the evening breeze.