The very space
which tonight was still Isabel's room would be cut into new shapes by
new walls and floors and ceilings; yet the room would always live, for
it could not die out of George's memory. It would live as long as he
did, and it would always be murmurous with a tragic, wistful
whispering.
And if space itself can be haunted, as memory is haunted, then some
time, when the space that was Isabel's room came to be made into the
small bedrooms and "kitchenettes" already designed as its destiny,
that space might well be haunted and the new occupants come to feel
that some seemingly causeless depression hung about it--a wraith of
the passion that filled it throughout the last night that George
Minafer spent there.
Whatever remnants of the old high-handed arrogance were still within
him, he did penance for his deepest sin that night--and it may be that
to this day some impressionable, overworked woman in a "kitchenette,"
after turning out the light will seem to see a young man kneeling in
the darkness, shaking convulsively, and, with arms outstretched
through the wall, clutching at the covers of a shadowy bed.
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