The money lay in her hand, and her fingers opened on it and closed on it. Then she breathed softly, like a sigh, and went to her desk and put it away.
THROUGH the weeks that followed Eldridge watched the things money could buy quietly taking their place in the house. Little comforts that he had not missed--had not known any one could miss--were at hand. The children looked somehow subtly different. He had a sense of expansion, softly breaking threads of habit, expectancy. Only Rosalind seemed unchanged. Yet each time he looked at her he fancied that she _had_ changed--more than all of them. He could not keep his eyes from her. Something was hidden in her--Something he did not know--that he would never know. Perhaps he should die and not know it.... Did the dead know things--everything? He seemed to remember hazily from Sunday-school--something--If he were dead, he might come close to her--as close as the little thoughts behind her eyes----
The cold grew keener, and Eldridge, shivering home from the office, remembered a pair of fur gloves in the attic. He had not worn them for years. But after supper he took a light and went to look for them.
It was cold there, in the attic, and he shivered a little, looking about the dusty place. There were boxes stacked along under the eaves and garments hanging grotesquely from the beams. He knew where Rosalind kept the gloves; he had seen them one day last summer when he was looking for window netting. It had not seemed to him then, in the hot attic, that any one could ever need gloves. He set down the lamp on a box and drew out a trunk and looked in it; they were not there. She must have changed the place of things--he would have to go down and ask her.
Then his eye sought out a box pushed far back under the eaves--he did not remember that he had ever seen that box; he glanced at it--and half turned away to pick up the lamp--and turned back. He could not have told why he felt that he must open it. He had set the light on a box a little above him, and it glimmered down on the box that he drew out and opened--and on a smooth piece of tissue-paper under the cover----A faint perfume came from beneath the paper, and he lifted it. There was a pair of long grey gloves--with the shape of a woman’s hand still softly held in the finger-tips.... He lifted them and stared and moistened his lips and ran his hand down inside the box to the bottom--soft, filmy stuff that yielded and sprang back.... He kneeled before it, half on his heels, peering down. He bent forward and lifted the things out--white things with threaded ribbon and lace--things such as Eldridge Walcott had never seen--delicate, web-like things--then a fur-lined coat and a grey dress and, at the bottom, a little linked something. He lifted it and peered at it and at the coins shining through the meshes and dropped it back.