priest and no altar to make him for ever widowed. He had done many
things in the world--he had done almost all but one: he had never,
never forgotten. He had tried to put into his existence whatever
else might take up room in it, but had failed to make it more than
a house of which the mistress was eternally absent. She was most
absent of all on the recurrent December day that his tenacity set
apart. He had no arranged observance of it, but his nerves made it
all their own. They drove him forth without mercy, and the goal of
his pilgrimage was far. She had been buried in a London suburb, a
part then of Nature's breast, but which he had seen lose one after
another every feature of freshness. It was in truth during the
moments he stood there that his eyes beheld the place least. They
looked at another image, they opened to another light. Was it a
credible future? Was it an incredible past? Whatever the answer
it was an immense escape from the actual.

It's true that if there weren't other dates than this there were
other memories; and by the time George Stransom was fifty-five such
memories had greatly multiplied. There were other ghosts in his
life than the ghost of Mary Antrim. He had perhaps not had more
losses than most men, but he had counted his losses more; he hadn't
seen death more closely, but had in a manner felt it more deeply.
He had formed little by little the habit of numbering his Dead: it
had come to him early in life that there was something one had to
do for them. They were there in their simplified intensified
essence, their conscious absence and expressive patience, as
personally there as if they had only been stricken dumb. When all
sense of them failed, all sound of them ceased, it was as if their
purgatory were really still on earth: they asked so little that
they got, poor things, even less, and died again, died every day,