When Mrs. Derdon turned away from the mirror that reflected her hopelessness, she saw the walls of her house, and its furniture, the pictures and chairs and the little rugs and ornaments, and the sight of all these things hurt her, because she had tried hard to keep the house as it had been when John left it, and the house was getting away from her and away from the way it had been when John lived in it, when she and John lived in it together. There seemed to be no way of controlling the change that was taking place in the house. Two of the cups from the good set had slipped out of her hands for no reason at all when she was taking them with the rest of the good china to wash, and now her arrangement of glass and china in the glass-fronted cupboard in the back sitting room looked incomplete. There was a big stain on one of the sofa cushions in the front sitting room and she did not know how it had got there. One of the children from the neighboring houses threw a ball into the front garden and crippled a rose tree that had grown in safety for years there. She herself in a fit of despair removed a little pile of newspapers and magazines and pamphlets that John had left on his desk in his bedroom. She had not thrown them out, they were on the bottom shelf of the cupboard in the kitchen, but even if she carried them back up to his room they would not be exactly as he had left them, and they would never again look just as they had when he had last seen them. And she bitterly regretted pulling out the rusty little wad of newspaper that he had been accustomed to stuff underneath the door of his wardrobe to keep it tightly shut. She had thrown it into the fire and fitted a new bit of newspaper under the door. Nothing would ever be the same.