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“Yes.” He now spoke rapidly, with more confidence.”My mother had the house, and we were here for seven months. And the house belonged to Dr. Packer,” he went on. “We rented it from him.”

“Yes,” the woman said, and nodded, “this was Dr. Packer’s house. He’s dead now, he’s been dead for many years. But this was the Packer house, all right.”

“That entrance on the side,” he said, “where the steps go up, that was for Dr. Packer’s patients. That was the entrance to his office.”

“Oh,” the woman said, “I didn’t know that. I’ve often wondered what it was. I didn’t know what it was for.”

“And this big room in front here,” he continued, “that was the office. And there were sliding doors, and next to it, a kind of alcove for his patients—”

“Yes, the alcove is still there, only all of it has been made into one room now—and I never knew just what the alcove was for.”

“And there were sliding doors on this side, too, that opened on the hall—and a stairway going up upon this side. And half-way up the stairway, at the landing, a little window of colored glass—and across the sliding doors here in the hall, a kind of curtain made of strings of beads.”

She nodded, smiling.”Yes, it’s just the same—we still have the sliding doors and the stained glass window on the stairs. There’s no bead curtain any more,” she said, “but I remember when people had them. I know what you mean.”

“When we were here,” he said, “we used the doctor’s office for a parlor—except later on—the last month or two—and then we used it for—a bedroom.”

“It is a bedroom now,” she said.”I run the house—I rent rooms—all of the rooms upstairs are rented—but I have two brothers and they sleep in this front room.”

Both of them were silent for a moment, then Eugene said, “My brother stayed there too.”

“In the front room?” the woman said.

He answered, “Yes.”

She paused, then said: “Won’t you come in? I don’t believe it’s changed much. Would you like to see?”

He thanked her and said he would, and he went up the steps. She opened the screen door to let him in.

Inside it was just the same—the stairs, the hallway, the sliding doors, the window of stained glass upon the stairs. And all of it was just the same, except for absence, the stained light of absence in the afternoon, and the child who once had sat there, waiting on the stairs.

It was all the same except that as a child he had sat there feeling things wereSomewhere—and now he knew. He had sat there feeling that a vast and sultry river was somewhere—and now he knew! He had sat there wondering what King’s Highway was, where it began, and where it ended—now he knew! He had sat there haunted by the magic word “downtown”!—now he knew!—and by the street car, after it had gone—and by all things that came and went and came again, like the cloud shadows passing in a wood, that never could be captured.

And he felt that if he could only sit there on the stairs once more, in solitude and absence in the afternoon, he would be able to get it back again. Then would he be able to remember all that he had seen and been—the brief sum of himself, the universe of his four years, with all the light of Time upon it—that universe which was so short to measure, and yet so far, so endless, to remember. Then would he be able to see his own small face again, pooled in the dark mirror of the hall, and peer once more into the grave eyes of the child that he had been, and discover there in his quiet three years, self the lone integrity of “I,” knowing: “Here is the House and here House listening; here is Absence, Absence in the afternoon; and here in this House, this Absence, is my core, my kernel—here am I! “