Ellen meanwhile had laid down her sewing with a sudden impatient gesture and gone up to the attic. After all, she thought, it has to be done and I might as well get at it. It must have been years since Ellen had pushed open the low door into the attic, and she never did it without the same queer sensation of interrupting something, for this jumble of the past, stowed away without order, haven of field mice in winter, was at the same time fearfully dead and fearfully alive.

There was just one naked light bulb hanging up there, but she could see enough—at first glance, a wild disorder of abandoned tools, toys, clothes, quilts too worn to be worth mending, but as soon as someone stepped in, strangely alive. It held so much life in it, so much of the past. Now, as always, she hesitated at the threshold, peering around. There was the dear old rocking horse her children had inherited from their grandmother on Rufus’s side, the mane and tail nothing but a few black hairs, the leather of the saddle crumbled away into dust. Ellen laid a hand on Blackie’s neck, thinking of Nick at about five riding hell-bent for leather. “I’m going to China!” he had called out. “I’ll never stop!” He never got to China—only as far as some island in the Pacific, to be shattered inside by gunfire.