The story begins by designating the temporal setting as “[w]hatever hour,” already setting an undefined time to the story. This instantly offsets any expectation of linearity and aims to replicate the narrator’s sense of time rather than impose order onto these impressions. The instantly disorienting sense of time threads throughout the story as it changes from night to day to night abruptly, and the narrator wakes up from sleep but returns to bed.

The overall tone of the short story is not one of suspense, as would be conventional in ghost stories. There is a pervasive sadness that permeates the narrative: a longing for something that has been missing in the ghosts’ existence. Virginia Woolf communicates this aura of sadness by the short sentences the ghosts use to communicate with one another: “Here we left it” (3); “the room…” (4). The short sentences the ghosts tell each other and the constant murmurs they exchange, in addition to broken sentences, add to the climate of sadness and melancholy of the short story. This ambience is further deepened by the descriptions of the house and the garden. “The house all empty, the

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