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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories
+of the Supernatural, by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural
+
+Author: Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
+
+Posting Date: February 22, 2010 [EBook #1617]
+Release Date: January, 1999
+Last Updated: June 6, 2005
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WIND IN THE ROSE-BUSH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Donald Lainson.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WIND IN THE ROSE-BUSH
+
+And Other Stories Of The Supernatural
+
+
+By
+
+Mary Wilkins
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+  The Wind in the Rose-bush
+  The Shadows on the Wall
+  Luella Miller
+  The Southwest Chamber
+  The Vacant Lot
+  The Lost Ghost
+
+
+
+
+THE WIND IN THE ROSE-BUSH
+
+
+Ford Village has no railroad station, being on the other side of the
+river from Porter's Falls, and accessible only by the ford which gives
+it its name, and a ferry line.
+
+The ferry-boat was waiting when Rebecca Flint got off the train with
+her bag and lunch basket.  When she and her small trunk were safely
+embarked she sat stiff and straight and calm in the ferry-boat as it
+shot swiftly and smoothly across stream.  There was a horse attached to
+a light country wagon on board, and he pawed the deck uneasily.  His
+owner stood near, with a wary eye upon him, although he was chewing,
+with as dully reflective an expression as a cow.  Beside Rebecca sat a
+woman of about her own age, who kept looking at her with furtive
+curiosity; her husband, short and stout and saturnine, stood near her.
+Rebecca paid no attention to either of them.  She was tall and spare
+and pale, the type of a spinster, yet with rudimentary lines and
+expressions of matronhood. She all unconsciously held her shawl, rolled
+up in a canvas bag, on her left hip, as if it had been a child.  She
+wore a settled frown of dissent at life, but it was the frown of a
+mother who regarded life as a froward child, rather than as an
+overwhelming fate.
+
+The other woman continued staring at her; she was mildly stupid, except
+for an over-developed curiosity which made her at times sharp beyond
+belief.  Her eyes glittered, red spots came on her flaccid cheeks; she
+kept opening her mouth to speak, making little abortive motions.
+Finally she could endure it no longer; she nudged Rebecca boldly.
+
+"A pleasant day," said she.
+
+Rebecca looked at her and nodded coldly.
+
+"Yes, very," she assented.
+
+"Have you come far?"
+
+"I have come from Michigan."
+
+"Oh!" said the woman, with awe.  "It's a long way," she remarked
+presently.
+
+"Yes, it is," replied Rebecca, conclusively.
+
+Still the other woman was not daunted; there was something which she
+determined to know, possibly roused thereto by a vague sense of
+incongruity in the other's appearance.  "It's a long ways to come and
+leave a family," she remarked with painful slyness.
+
+"I ain't got any family to leave," returned Rebecca shortly.
+
+"Then you ain't--"
+
+"No, I ain't."
+
+"Oh!" said the woman.
+
+Rebecca looked straight ahead at the race of the river.
+
+It was a long ferry.  Finally Rebecca herself waxed unexpectedly
+loquacious.  She turned to the other woman and inquired if she knew
+John Dent's widow who lived in Ford Village.  "Her husband died about
+three years ago," said she, by way of detail.
+
+The woman started violently.  She turned pale, then she flushed; she
+cast a strange glance at her husband, who was regarding both women with
+a sort of stolid keenness.
+
+"Yes, I guess I do," faltered the woman finally.
+
+"Well, his first wife was my sister," said Rebecca with the air of one
+imparting important intelligence.
+
+"Was she?" responded the other woman feebly.  She glanced at her
+husband with an expression of doubt and terror, and he shook his head
+forbiddingly.
+
+"I'm going to see her, and take my niece Agnes home with me," said
+Rebecca.
+
+Then the woman gave such a violent start that she noticed it.
+
+"What is the matter?" she asked.
+
+"Nothin', I guess," replied the woman, with eyes on her husband, who
+was slowly shaking his head, like a Chinese toy.
+
+"Is my niece sick?" asked Rebecca with quick suspicion.
+
+"No, she ain't sick," replied the woman with alacrity, then she caught
+her breath with a gasp.
+
+"When did you see her?"
+
+"Let me see; I ain't seen her for some little time," replied the woman.
+Then she caught her breath again.
+
+"She ought to have grown up real pretty, if she takes after my sister.
+She was a real pretty woman," Rebecca said wistfully.
+
+"Yes, I guess she did grow up pretty," replied the woman in a trembling
+voice.
+
+"What kind of a woman is the second wife?"
+
+The woman glanced at her husband's warning face.  She continued to gaze
+at him while she replied in a choking voice to Rebecca:
+
+"I--guess she's a nice woman," she replied.  "I--don't know, I--guess
+so.  I--don't see much of her."
+
+"I felt kind of hurt that John married again so quick," said Rebecca;
+"but I suppose he wanted his house kept, and Agnes wanted care.  I
+wasn't so situated that I could take her when her mother died.  I had
+my own mother to care for, and I was school-teaching. Now mother has
+gone, and my uncle died six months ago and left me quite a little
+property, and I've given up my school, and I've come for Agnes.  I
+guess she'll be glad to go with me, though I suppose her stepmother is
+a good woman, and has always done for her."
+
+The man's warning shake at his wife was fairly portentous.
+
+"I guess so," said she.
+
+"John always wrote that she was a beautiful woman," said Rebecca.
+
+Then the ferry-boat grated on the shore.
+
+John Dent's widow had sent a horse and wagon to meet her sister-in-law.
+When the woman and her husband went down the road, on which Rebecca in
+the wagon with her trunk soon passed them, she said reproachfully:
+
+"Seems as if I'd ought to have told her, Thomas."
+
+"Let her find it out herself," replied the man.  "Don't you go to
+burnin' your fingers in other folks' puddin', Maria."
+
+"Do you s'pose she'll see anything?" asked the woman with a spasmodic
+shudder and a terrified roll of her eyes.
+
+"See!" returned her husband with stolid scorn.  "Better be sure there's
+anything to see."
+
+"Oh, Thomas, they say--"
+
+"Lord, ain't you found out that what they say is mostly lies?"
+
+"But if it should be true, and she's a nervous woman, she might be
+scared enough to lose her wits," said his wife, staring uneasily after
+Rebecca's erect figure in the wagon disappearing over the crest of the
+hilly road.
+
+"Wits that so easy upset ain't worth much," declared the man.  "You
+keep out of it, Maria."
+
+Rebecca in the meantime rode on in the wagon, beside a flaxen-headed
+boy, who looked, to her understanding, not very bright.  She asked him
+a question, and he paid no attention.  She repeated it, and he
+responded with a bewildered and incoherent grunt.  Then she let him
+alone, after making sure that he knew how to drive straight.
+
+They had traveled about half a mile, passed the village square, and
+gone a short distance beyond, when the boy drew up with a sudden Whoa!
+before a very prosperous-looking house.  It had been one of the
+aboriginal cottages of the vicinity, small and white, with a roof
+extending on one side over a piazza, and a tiny "L" jutting out in the
+rear, on the right hand.  Now the cottage was transformed by dormer
+windows, a bay window on the piazzaless side, a carved railing down the
+front steps, and a modern hard-wood door.
+
+"Is this John Dent's house?" asked Rebecca.
+
+The boy was as sparing of speech as a philosopher.  His only response
+was in flinging the reins over the horse's back, stretching out one
+foot to the shaft, and leaping out of the wagon, then going around to
+the rear for the trunk.  Rebecca got out and went toward the house.
+Its white paint had a new gloss; its blinds were an immaculate apple
+green; the lawn was trimmed as smooth as velvet, and it was dotted with
+scrupulous groups of hydrangeas and cannas.
+
+"I always understood that John Dent was well-to-do," Rebecca reflected
+comfortably.  "I guess Agnes will have considerable. I've got enough,
+but it will come in handy for her schooling.  She can have advantages."
+
+The boy dragged the trunk up the fine gravel-walk, but before he
+reached the steps leading up to the piazza, for the house stood on a
+terrace, the front door opened and a fair, frizzled head of a very
+large and handsome woman appeared.  She held up her black silk skirt,
+disclosing voluminous ruffles of starched embroidery, and waited for
+Rebecca.  She smiled placidly, her pink, double-chinned face widened
+and dimpled, but her blue eyes were wary and calculating.  She extended
+her hand as Rebecca climbed the steps.
+
+"This is Miss Flint, I suppose," said she.
+
+"Yes, ma'am," replied Rebecca, noticing with bewilderment a curious
+expression compounded of fear and defiance on the other's face.
+
+"Your letter only arrived this morning," said Mrs. Dent, in a steady
+voice.  Her great face was a uniform pink, and her china-blue eyes were
+at once aggressive and veiled with secrecy.
+
+"Yes, I hardly thought you'd get my letter," replied Rebecca.  "I felt
+as if I could not wait to hear from you before I came.  I supposed you
+would be so situated that you could have me a little while without
+putting you out too much, from what John used to write me about his
+circumstances, and when I had that money so unexpected I felt as if I
+must come for Agnes.  I suppose you will be willing to give her up.
+You know she's my own blood, and of course she's no relation to you,
+though you must have got attached to her.  I know from her picture what
+a sweet girl she must be, and John always said she looked like her own
+mother, and Grace was a beautiful woman, if she was my sister."
+
+Rebecca stopped and stared at the other woman in amazement and alarm.
+The great handsome blonde creature stood speechless, livid, gasping,
+with her hand to her heart, her lips parted in a horrible caricature of
+a smile.
+
+"Are you sick!" cried Rebecca, drawing near.  "Don't you want me to get
+you some water!"
+
+Then Mrs. Dent recovered herself with a great effort.  "It is nothing,"
+she said.  "I am subject to--spells.  I am over it now. Won't you come
+in, Miss Flint?"
+
+As she spoke, the beautiful deep-rose colour suffused her face, her
+blue eyes met her visitor's with the opaqueness of turquoise--with a
+revelation of blue, but a concealment of all behind.
+
+Rebecca followed her hostess in, and the boy, who had waited
+quiescently, climbed the steps with the trunk.  But before they entered
+the door a strange thing happened.  On the upper terrace close to the
+piazza-post, grew a great rose-bush, and on it, late in the season
+though it was, one small red, perfect rose.
+
+Rebecca looked at it, and the other woman extended her hand with a
+quick gesture.  "Don't you pick that rose!" she brusquely cried.
+
+Rebecca drew herself up with stiff dignity.
+
+"I ain't in the habit of picking other folks' roses without leave,"
+said she.
+
+As Rebecca spoke she started violently, and lost sight of her
+resentment, for something singular happened.  Suddenly the rose-bush
+was agitated violently as if by a gust of wind, yet it was a remarkably
+still day.  Not a leaf of the hydrangea standing on the terrace close
+to the rose trembled.
+
+"What on earth--" began Rebecca, then she stopped with a gasp at the
+sight of the other woman's face.  Although a face, it gave somehow the
+impression of a desperately clutched hand of secrecy.
+
+"Come in!" said she in a harsh voice, which seemed to come forth from
+her chest with no intervention of the organs of speech.  "Come into the
+house.  I'm getting cold out here."
+
+"What makes that rose-bush blow so when their isn't any wind?" asked
+Rebecca, trembling with vague horror, yet resolute.
+
+"I don't see as it is blowing," returned the woman calmly.  And as she
+spoke, indeed, the bush was quiet.
+
+"It was blowing," declared Rebecca.
+
+"It isn't now," said Mrs. Dent.  "I can't try to account for everything
+that blows out-of-doors.  I have too much to do."
+
+She spoke scornfully and confidently, with defiant, unflinching eyes,
+first on the bush, then on Rebecca, and led the way into the house.
+
+"It looked queer," persisted Rebecca, but she followed, and also the
+boy with the trunk.
+
+Rebecca entered an interior, prosperous, even elegant, according to her
+simple ideas. There were Brussels carpets, lace curtains, and plenty of
+brilliant upholstery and polished wood.
+
+"You're real nicely situated," remarked Rebecca, after she had become a
+little accustomed to her new surroundings and the two women were seated
+at the tea-table.
+
+Mrs. Dent stared with a hard complacency from behind her silver-plated
+service.  "Yes, I be," said she.
+
+"You got all the things new?" said Rebecca hesitatingly, with a jealous
+memory of her dead sister's bridal furnishings.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Dent; "I was never one to want dead folks' things, and
+I had money enough of my own, so I wasn't beholden to John.  I had the
+old duds put up at auction.  They didn't bring much."
+
+"I suppose you saved some for Agnes.  She'll want some of her poor
+mother's things when she is grown up," said Rebecca with some
+indignation.
+
+The defiant stare of Mrs. Dent's blue eyes waxed more intense. "There's
+a few things up garret," said she.
+
+"She'll be likely to value them," remarked Rebecca.  As she spoke she
+glanced at the window.  "Isn't it most time for her to be coming home?"
+she asked.
+
+"Most time," answered Mrs. Dent carelessly; "but when she gets over to
+Addie Slocum's she never knows when to come home."
+
+"Is Addie Slocum her intimate friend?"
+
+"Intimate as any."
+
+"Maybe we can have her come out to see Agnes when she's living with
+me," said Rebecca wistfully.  "I suppose she'll be likely to be
+homesick at first."
+
+"Most likely," answered Mrs. Dent.
+
+"Does she call you mother?" Rebecca asked.
+
+"No, she calls me Aunt Emeline," replied the other woman shortly. "When
+did you say you were going home?"
+
+"In about a week, I thought, if she can be ready to go so soon,"
+answered Rebecca with a surprised look.
+
+She reflected that she would not remain a day longer than she could
+help after such an inhospitable look and question.
+
+"Oh, as far as that goes," said Mrs. Dent, "it wouldn't make any
+difference about her being ready.  You could go home whenever you felt
+that you must, and she could come afterward."
+
+"Alone?"
+
+"Why not?  She's a big girl now, and you don't have to change cars."
+
+"My niece will go home when I do, and not travel alone; and if I can't
+wait here for her, in the house that used to be her mother's and my
+sister's home, I'll go and board somewhere," returned Rebecca with
+warmth.
+
+"Oh, you can stay here as long as you want to.  You're welcome," said
+Mrs. Dent.
+
+Then Rebecca started.  "There she is!" she declared in a trembling,
+exultant voice.  Nobody knew how she longed to see the girl.
+
+"She isn't as late as I thought she'd be," said Mrs. Dent, and again
+that curious, subtle change passed over her face, and again it settled
+into that stony impassiveness.
+
+Rebecca stared at the door, waiting for it to open.  "Where is she?"
+she asked presently.
+
+"I guess she's stopped to take off her hat in the entry," suggested
+Mrs. Dent.
+
+Rebecca waited.  "Why don't she come?  It can't take her all this time
+to take off her hat."
+
+For answer Mrs. Dent rose with a stiff jerk and threw open the door.
+
+"Agnes!" she called.  "Agnes!"  Then she turned and eyed Rebecca. "She
+ain't there."
+
+"I saw her pass the window," said Rebecca in bewilderment.
+
+"You must have been mistaken."
+
+"I know I did," persisted Rebecca.
+
+"You couldn't have."
+
+"I did.  I saw first a shadow go over the ceiling, then I saw her in
+the glass there"--she pointed to a mirror over the sideboard
+opposite--"and then the shadow passed the window."
+
+"How did she look in the glass?"
+
+"Little and light-haired, with the light hair kind of tossing over her
+forehead."
+
+"You couldn't have seen her."
+
+"Was that like Agnes?"
+
+"Like enough; but of course you didn't see her.  You've been thinking
+so much about her that you thought you did."
+
+"You thought YOU did."
+
+"I thought I saw a shadow pass the window, but I must have been
+mistaken.  She didn't come in, or we would have seen her before now.  I
+knew it was too early for her to get home from Addie Slocum's, anyhow."
+
+When Rebecca went to bed Agnes had not returned.  Rebecca had resolved
+that she would not retire until the girl came, but she was very tired,
+and she reasoned with herself that she was foolish. Besides, Mrs. Dent
+suggested that Agnes might go to the church social with Addie Slocum.
+When Rebecca suggested that she be sent for and told that her aunt had
+come, Mrs. Dent laughed meaningly.
+
+"I guess you'll find out that a young girl ain't so ready to leave a
+sociable, where there's boys, to see her aunt," said she.
+
+"She's too young," said Rebecca incredulously and indignantly.
+
+"She's sixteen," replied Mrs. Dent; "and she's always been great for
+the boys."
+
+"She's going to school four years after I get her before she thinks of
+boys," declared Rebecca.
+
+"We'll see," laughed the other woman.
+
+After Rebecca went to bed, she lay awake a long time listening for the
+sound of girlish laughter and a boy's voice under her window; then she
+fell asleep.
+
+The next morning she was down early.  Mrs. Dent, who kept no servants,
+was busily preparing breakfast.
+
+"Don't Agnes help you about breakfast?" asked Rebecca.
+
+"No, I let her lay," replied Mrs. Dent shortly.
+
+"What time did she get home last night?"
+
+"She didn't get home."
+
+"What?"
+
+"She didn't get home.  She stayed with Addie.  She often does."
+
+"Without sending you word?"
+
+"Oh, she knew I wouldn't worry."
+
+"When will she be home?"
+
+"Oh, I guess she'll be along pretty soon."
+
+Rebecca was uneasy, but she tried to conceal it, for she knew of no
+good reason for uneasiness.  What was there to occasion alarm in the
+fact of one young girl staying overnight with another?  She could not
+eat much breakfast.  Afterward she went out on the little piazza,
+although her hostess strove furtively to stop her.
+
+"Why don't you go out back of the house?  It's real pretty--a view over
+the river," she said.
+
+"I guess I'll go out here," replied Rebecca.  She had a purpose: to
+watch for the absent girl.
+
+Presently Rebecca came hustling into the house through the
+sitting-room, into the kitchen where Mrs. Dent was cooking.
+
+"That rose-bush!" she gasped.
+
+Mrs. Dent turned and faced her.
+
+"What of it?"
+
+"It's a-blowing."
+
+"What of it?"
+
+"There isn't a mite of wind this morning."
+
+Mrs. Dent turned with an inimitable toss of her fair head.  "If you
+think I can spend my time puzzling over such nonsense as--" she began,
+but Rebecca interrupted her with a cry and a rush to the door.
+
+"There she is now!" she cried.  She flung the door wide open, and
+curiously enough a breeze came in and her own gray hair tossed, and a
+paper blew off the table to the floor with a loud rustle, but there was
+nobody in sight.
+
+"There's nobody here," Rebecca said.
+
+She looked blankly at the other woman, who brought her rolling-pin down
+on a slab of pie-crust with a thud.
+
+"I didn't hear anybody," she said calmly.
+
+"I SAW SOMEBODY PASS THAT WINDOW!"
+
+"You were mistaken again."
+
+"I KNOW I saw somebody."
+
+"You couldn't have.  Please shut that door."
+
+Rebecca shut the door.  She sat down beside the window and looked out
+on the autumnal yard, with its little curve of footpath to the kitchen
+door.
+
+"What smells so strong of roses in this room?" she said presently. She
+sniffed hard.
+
+"I don't smell anything but these nutmegs."
+
+"It is not nutmeg."
+
+"I don't smell anything else."
+
+"Where do you suppose Agnes is?"
+
+"Oh, perhaps she has gone over the ferry to Porter's Falls with Addie.
+She often does.  Addie's got an aunt over there, and Addie's got a
+cousin, a real pretty boy."
+
+"You suppose she's gone over there?"
+
+"Mebbe.  I shouldn't wonder."
+
+"When should she be home?"
+
+"Oh, not before afternoon."
+
+Rebecca waited with all the patience she could muster.  She kept
+reassuring herself, telling herself that it was all natural, that the
+other woman could not help it, but she made up her mind that if Agnes
+did not return that afternoon she should be sent for.
+
+When it was four o'clock she started up with resolution.  She had been
+furtively watching the onyx clock on the sitting-room mantel; she had
+timed herself.  She had said that if Agnes was not home by that time
+she should demand that she be sent for.  She rose and stood before Mrs.
+Dent, who looked up coolly from her embroidery.
+
+"I've waited just as long as I'm going to," she said.  "I've come 'way
+from Michigan to see my own sister's daughter and take her home with
+me.  I've been here ever since yesterday--twenty-four hours--and I
+haven't seen her.  Now I'm going to.  I want her sent for."
+
+Mrs. Dent folded her embroidery and rose.
+
+"Well, I don't blame you," she said.  "It is high time she came home.
+I'll go right over and get her myself."
+
+Rebecca heaved a sigh of relief.  She hardly knew what she had
+suspected or feared, but she knew that her position had been one of
+antagonism if not accusation, and she was sensible of relief.
+
+"I wish you would," she said gratefully, and went back to her chair,
+while Mrs. Dent got her shawl and her little white head-tie. "I
+wouldn't trouble you, but I do feel as if I couldn't wait any longer to
+see her," she remarked apologetically.
+
+"Oh, it ain't any trouble at all," said Mrs. Dent as she went out. "I
+don't blame you; you have waited long enough."
+
+Rebecca sat at the window watching breathlessly until Mrs. Dent came
+stepping through the yard alone.  She ran to the door and saw, hardly
+noticing it this time, that the rose-bush was again violently agitated,
+yet with no wind evident elsewhere.
+
+"Where is she?" she cried.
+
+Mrs. Dent laughed with stiff lips as she came up the steps over the
+terrace.  "Girls will be girls," said she.  "She's gone with Addie to
+Lincoln.  Addie's got an uncle who's conductor on the train, and lives
+there, and he got 'em passes, and they're goin' to stay to Addie's Aunt
+Margaret's a few days.  Mrs. Slocum said Agnes didn't have time to come
+over and ask me before the train went, but she took it on herself to
+say it would be all right, and--"
+
+"Why hadn't she been over to tell you?" Rebecca was angry, though not
+suspicious.  She even saw no reason for her anger.
+
+"Oh, she was putting up grapes.  She was coming over just as soon as
+she got the black off her hands.  She heard I had company, and her
+hands were a sight.  She was holding them over sulphur matches."
+
+"You say she's going to stay a few days?" repeated Rebecca dazedly.
+
+"Yes; till Thursday, Mrs. Slocum said."
+
+"How far is Lincoln from here?"
+
+"About fifty miles.  It'll be a real treat to her.  Mrs. Slocum's
+sister is a real nice woman."
+
+"It is goin' to make it pretty late about my goin' home."
+
+"If you don't feel as if you could wait, I'll get her ready and send
+her on just as soon as I can," Mrs. Dent said sweetly.
+
+"I'm going to wait," said Rebecca grimly.
+
+The two women sat down again, and Mrs. Dent took up her embroidery.
+
+"Is there any sewing I can do for her?" Rebecca asked finally in a
+desperate way.  "If I can get her sewing along some--"
+
+Mrs. Dent arose with alacrity and fetched a mass of white from the
+closet.  "Here," she said, "if you want to sew the lace on this
+nightgown.  I was going to put her to it, but she'll be glad enough to
+get rid of it.  She ought to have this and one more before she goes.  I
+don't like to send her away without some good underclothing."
+
+Rebecca snatched at the little white garment and sewed feverishly.
+
+That night she wakened from a deep sleep a little after midnight and
+lay a minute trying to collect her faculties and explain to herself
+what she was listening to.  At last she discovered that it was the then
+popular strains of "The Maiden's Prayer" floating up through the floor
+from the piano in the sitting-room below.  She jumped up, threw a shawl
+over her nightgown, and hurried downstairs trembling.  There was nobody
+in the sitting-room; the piano was silent.  She ran to Mrs. Dent's
+bedroom and called hysterically:
+
+"Emeline!  Emeline!"
+
+"What is it?" asked Mrs. Dent's voice from the bed.  The voice was
+stern, but had a note of consciousness in it.
+
+"Who--who was that playing 'The Maiden's Prayer' in the sitting-room,
+on the piano?"
+
+"I didn't hear anybody."
+
+"There was some one."
+
+"I didn't hear anything."
+
+"I tell you there was some one.  But--THERE AIN'T ANYBODY THERE."
+
+"I didn't hear anything."
+
+"I did--somebody playing 'The Maiden's Prayer' on the piano.  Has Agnes
+got home?  I WANT TO KNOW."
+
+"Of course Agnes hasn't got home," answered Mrs. Dent with rising
+inflection.  "Be you gone crazy over that girl?  The last boat from
+Porter's Falls was in before we went to bed.  Of course she ain't come."
+
+"I heard--"
+
+"You were dreaming."
+
+"I wasn't; I was broad awake."
+
+Rebecca went back to her chamber and kept her lamp burning all night.
+
+The next morning her eyes upon Mrs. Dent were wary and blazing with
+suppressed excitement.  She kept opening her mouth as if to speak, then
+frowning, and setting her lips hard.  After breakfast she went
+upstairs, and came down presently with her coat and bonnet.
+
+"Now, Emeline," she said, "I want to know where the Slocums live."
+
+Mrs. Dent gave a strange, long, half-lidded glance at her.  She was
+finishing her coffee.
+
+"Why?" she asked.
+
+"I'm going over there and find out if they have heard anything from her
+daughter and Agnes since they went away.  I don't like what I heard
+last night."
+
+"You must have been dreaming."
+
+"It don't make any odds whether I was or not.  Does she play 'The
+Maiden's Prayer' on the piano?  I want to know."
+
+"What if she does?  She plays it a little, I believe.  I don't know.
+She don't half play it, anyhow; she ain't got an ear."
+
+"That wasn't half played last night.  I don't like such things
+happening.  I ain't superstitious, but I don't like it.  I'm going.
+Where do the Slocums live?"
+
+"You go down the road over the bridge past the old grist mill, then you
+turn to the left; it's the only house for half a mile.  You can't miss
+it.  It has a barn with a ship in full sail on the cupola."
+
+"Well, I'm going.  I don't feel easy."
+
+About two hours later Rebecca returned.  There were red spots on her
+cheeks.  She looked wild.  "I've been there," she said, "and there
+isn't a soul at home.  Something HAS happened."
+
+"What has happened?"
+
+"I don't know.  Something.  I had a warning last night.  There wasn't a
+soul there.  They've been sent for to Lincoln."
+
+"Did you see anybody to ask?" asked Mrs. Dent with thinly concealed
+anxiety.
+
+"I asked the woman that lives on the turn of the road.  She's stone
+deaf.  I suppose you know.  She listened while I screamed at her to
+know where the Slocums were, and then she said, 'Mrs. Smith don't live
+here.'  I didn't see anybody on the road, and that's the only house.
+What do you suppose it means?"
+
+"I don't suppose it means much of anything," replied Mrs. Dent coolly.
+"Mr. Slocum is conductor on the railroad, and he'd be away anyway, and
+Mrs. Slocum often goes early when he does, to spend the day with her
+sister in Porter's Falls.  She'd be more likely to go away than Addie."
+
+"And you don't think anything has happened?" Rebecca asked with
+diminishing distrust before the reasonableness of it.
+
+"Land, no!"
+
+Rebecca went upstairs to lay aside her coat and bonnet.  But she came
+hurrying back with them still on.
+
+"Who's been in my room?" she gasped.  Her face was pale as ashes.
+
+Mrs. Dent also paled as she regarded her.
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked slowly.
+
+"I found when I went upstairs that--little nightgown of--Agnes's
+on--the bed, laid out.  It was--LAID OUT.  The sleeves were folded
+across the bosom, and there was that little red rose between them.
+Emeline, what is it?  Emeline, what's the matter?  Oh!"
+
+Mrs. Dent was struggling for breath in great, choking gasps.  She clung
+to the back of a chair.  Rebecca, trembling herself so she could
+scarcely keep on her feet, got her some water.
+
+As soon as she recovered herself Mrs. Dent regarded her with eyes full
+of the strangest mixture of fear and horror and hostility.
+
+"What do you mean talking so?" she said in a hard voice.
+
+"It IS THERE."
+
+"Nonsense.  You threw it down and it fell that way."
+
+"It was folded in my bureau drawer."
+
+"It couldn't have been."
+
+"Who picked that red rose?"
+
+"Look on the bush," Mrs. Dent replied shortly.
+
+Rebecca looked at her; her mouth gaped.  She hurried out of the room.
+When she came back her eyes seemed to protrude.  (She had in the
+meantime hastened upstairs, and come down with tottering steps,
+clinging to the banisters.)
+
+"Now I want to know what all this means?" she demanded.
+
+"What what means?"
+
+"The rose is on the bush, and it's gone from the bed in my room! Is
+this house haunted, or what?"
+
+"I don't know anything about a house being haunted.  I don't believe in
+such things.  Be you crazy?"  Mrs. Dent spoke with gathering force.
+The colour flashed back to her cheeks.
+
+"No," said Rebecca shortly.  "I ain't crazy yet, but I shall be if this
+keeps on much longer.  I'm going to find out where that girl is before
+night."
+
+Mrs. Dent eyed her.
+
+"What be you going to do?"
+
+"I'm going to Lincoln."
+
+A faint triumphant smile overspread Mrs. Dent's large face.
+
+"You can't," said she; "there ain't any train."
+
+"No train?"
+
+"No; there ain't any afternoon train from the Falls to Lincoln."
+
+"Then I'm going over to the Slocums' again to-night."
+
+However, Rebecca did not go; such a rain came up as deterred even her
+resolution, and she had only her best dresses with her.  Then in the
+evening came the letter from the Michigan village which she had left
+nearly a week ago.  It was from her cousin, a single woman, who had
+come to keep her house while she was away.  It was a pleasant
+unexciting letter enough, all the first of it, and related mostly how
+she missed Rebecca; how she hoped she was having pleasant weather and
+kept her health; and how her friend, Mrs. Greenaway, had come to stay
+with her since she had felt lonesome the first night in the house; how
+she hoped Rebecca would have no objections to this, although nothing
+had been said about it, since she had not realized that she might be
+nervous alone.  The cousin was painfully conscientious, hence the
+letter.  Rebecca smiled in spite of her disturbed mind as she read it,
+then her eye caught the postscript.  That was in a different hand,
+purporting to be written by the friend, Mrs. Hannah Greenaway,
+informing her that the cousin had fallen down the cellar stairs and
+broken her hip, and was in a dangerous condition, and begging Rebecca
+to return at once, as she herself was rheumatic and unable to nurse her
+properly, and no one else could be obtained.
+
+Rebecca looked at Mrs. Dent, who had come to her room with the letter
+quite late; it was half-past nine, and she had gone upstairs for the
+night.
+
+"Where did this come from?" she asked.
+
+"Mr. Amblecrom brought it," she replied.
+
+"Who's he?"
+
+"The postmaster.  He often brings the letters that come on the late
+mail.  He knows I ain't anybody to send.  He brought yours about your
+coming.  He said he and his wife came over on the ferry-boat with you."
+
+"I remember him," Rebecca replied shortly.  "There's bad news in this
+letter."
+
+Mrs. Dent's face took on an expression of serious inquiry.
+
+"Yes, my Cousin Harriet has fallen down the cellar stairs--they were
+always dangerous--and she's broken her hip, and I've got to take the
+first train home to-morrow."
+
+"You don't say so.  I'm dreadfully sorry."
+
+"No, you ain't sorry!" said Rebecca, with a look as if she leaped.
+"You're glad.  I don't know why, but you're glad.  You've wanted to get
+rid of me for some reason ever since I came.  I don't know why. You're
+a strange woman.  Now you've got your way, and I hope you're satisfied."
+
+"How you talk."
+
+Mrs. Dent spoke in a faintly injured voice, but there was a light in
+her eyes.
+
+"I talk the way it is.  Well, I'm going to-morrow morning, and I want
+you, just as soon as Agnes Dent comes home, to send her out to me.
+Don't you wait for anything.  You pack what clothes she's got, and
+don't wait even to mend them, and you buy her ticket.  I'll leave the
+money, and you send her along.  She don't have to change cars.  You
+start her off, when she gets home, on the next train!"
+
+"Very well," replied the other woman.  She had an expression of covert
+amusement.
+
+"Mind you do it."
+
+"Very well, Rebecca."
+
+Rebecca started on her journey the next morning.  When she arrived, two
+days later, she found her cousin in perfect health.  She found,
+moreover, that the friend had not written the postscript in the
+cousin's letter.  Rebecca would have returned to Ford Village the next
+morning, but the fatigue and nervous strain had been too much for her.
+She was not able to move from her bed.  She had a species of low fever
+induced by anxiety and fatigue.  But she could write, and she did, to
+the Slocums, and she received no answer.  She also wrote to Mrs. Dent;
+she even sent numerous telegrams, with no response.  Finally she wrote
+to the postmaster, and an answer arrived by the first possible mail.
+The letter was short, curt, and to the purpose.  Mr. Amblecrom, the
+postmaster, was a man of few words, and especially wary as to his
+expressions in a letter.
+
+"Dear madam," he wrote, "your favour rec'ed.  No Slocums in Ford's
+Village.  All dead.  Addie ten years ago, her mother two years later,
+her father five.  House vacant.  Mrs. John Dent said to have neglected
+stepdaughter.  Girl was sick.  Medicine not given.  Talk of taking
+action.  Not enough evidence.  House said to be haunted. Strange sights
+and sounds.  Your niece, Agnes Dent, died a year ago, about this time.
+
+"Yours truly,
+
+"THOMAS AMBLECROM."
+
+
+
+
+THE SHADOWS ON THE WALL
+
+
+"Henry had words with Edward in the study the night before Edward
+died," said Caroline Glynn.
+
+She was elderly, tall, and harshly thin, with a hard colourlessness of
+face.  She spoke not with acrimony, but with grave severity. Rebecca
+Ann Glynn, younger, stouter and rosy of face between her crinkling
+puffs of gray hair, gasped, by way of assent.  She sat in a wide
+flounce of black silk in the corner of the sofa, and rolled terrified
+eyes from her sister Caroline to her sister Mrs. Stephen Brigham, who
+had been Emma Glynn, the one beauty of the family. She was beautiful
+still, with a large, splendid, full-blown beauty; she filled a great
+rocking-chair with her superb bulk of femininity, and swayed gently
+back and forth, her black silks whispering and her black frills
+fluttering.  Even the shock of death (for her brother Edward lay dead
+in the house,) could not disturb her outward serenity of demeanour.
+She was grieved over the loss of her brother: he had been the youngest,
+and she had been fond of him, but never had Emma Brigham lost sight of
+her own importance amidst the waters of tribulation.  She was always
+awake to the consciousness of her own stability in the midst of
+vicissitudes and the splendour of her permanent bearing.
+
+But even her expression of masterly placidity changed before her sister
+Caroline's announcement and her sister Rebecca Ann's gasp of terror and
+distress in response.
+
+"I think Henry might have controlled his temper, when poor Edward was
+so near his end," said she with an asperity which disturbed slightly
+the roseate curves of her beautiful mouth.
+
+"Of course he did not KNOW," murmured Rebecca Ann in a faint tone
+strangely out of keeping with her appearance.
+
+One involuntarily looked again to be sure that such a feeble pipe came
+from that full-swelling chest.
+
+"Of course he did not know it," said Caroline quickly.  She turned on
+her sister with a strange sharp look of suspicion.  "How could he have
+known it?" said she.  Then she shrank as if from the other's possible
+answer.  "Of course you and I both know he could not," said she
+conclusively, but her pale face was paler than it had been before.
+
+Rebecca gasped again.  The married sister, Mrs. Emma Brigham, was now
+sitting up straight in her chair; she had ceased rocking, and was
+eyeing them both intently with a sudden accentuation of family likeness
+in her face.  Given one common intensity of emotion and similar lines
+showed forth, and the three sisters of one race were evident.
+
+"What do you mean?" said she impartially to them both.  Then she, too,
+seemed to shrink before a possible answer.  She even laughed an evasive
+sort of laugh.  "I guess you don't mean anything," said she, but her
+face wore still the expression of shrinking horror.
+
+"Nobody means anything," said Caroline firmly.  She rose and crossed
+the room toward the door with grim decisiveness.
+
+"Where are you going?" asked Mrs. Brigham.
+
+"I have something to see to," replied Caroline, and the others at once
+knew by her tone that she had some solemn and sad duty to perform in
+the chamber of death.
+
+"Oh," said Mrs. Brigham.
+
+After the door had closed behind Caroline, she turned to Rebecca.
+
+"Did Henry have many words with him?" she asked.
+
+"They were talking very loud," replied Rebecca evasively, yet with an
+answering gleam of ready response to the other's curiosity in the quick
+lift of her soft blue eyes.
+
+Mrs. Brigham looked at her.  She had not resumed rocking.  She still
+sat up straight with a slight knitting of intensity on her fair
+forehead, between the pretty rippling curves of her auburn hair.
+
+"Did you--hear anything?" she asked in a low voice with a glance toward
+the door.
+
+"I was just across the hall in the south parlour, and that door was
+open and this door ajar," replied Rebecca with a slight flush.
+
+"Then you must have--"
+
+"I couldn't help it."
+
+"Everything?"
+
+"Most of it."
+
+"What was it?"
+
+"The old story."
+
+"I suppose Henry was mad, as he always was, because Edward was living
+on here for nothing, when he had wasted all the money father left him."
+
+Rebecca nodded with a fearful glance at the door.
+
+When Emma spoke again her voice was still more hushed.  "I know how he
+felt," said she.  "He had always been so prudent himself, and worked
+hard at his profession, and there Edward had never done anything but
+spend, and it must have looked to him as if Edward was living at his
+expense, but he wasn't."
+
+"No, he wasn't."
+
+"It was the way father left the property--that all the children should
+have a home here--and he left money enough to buy the food and all if
+we had all come home."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And Edward had a right here according to the terms of father's will,
+and Henry ought to have remembered it."
+
+"Yes, he ought."
+
+"Did he say hard things?"
+
+"Pretty hard from what I heard."
+
+"What?"
+
+"I heard him tell Edward that he had no business here at all, and he
+thought he had better go away."
+
+"What did Edward say?"
+
+"That he would stay here as long as he lived and afterward, too, if he
+was a mind to, and he would like to see Henry get him out; and then--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Then he laughed."
+
+"What did Henry say."
+
+"I didn't hear him say anything, but--"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"I saw him when he came out of this room."
+
+"He looked mad?"
+
+"You've seen him when he looked so."
+
+Emma nodded; the expression of horror on her face had deepened.
+
+"Do you remember that time he killed the cat because she had scratched
+him?"
+
+"Yes.  Don't!"
+
+Then Caroline reentered the room.  She went up to the stove in which a
+wood fire was burning--it was a cold, gloomy day of fall--and she
+warmed her hands, which were reddened from recent washing in cold water.
+
+Mrs. Brigham looked at her and hesitated.  She glanced at the door,
+which was still ajar, as it did not easily shut, being still swollen
+with the damp weather of the summer.  She rose and pushed it together
+with a sharp thud which jarred the house.  Rebecca started painfully
+with a half exclamation.  Caroline looked at her disapprovingly.
+
+"It is time you controlled your nerves, Rebecca," said she.
+
+"I can't help it," replied Rebecca with almost a wail.  "I am nervous.
+There's enough to make me so, the Lord knows."
+
+"What do you mean by that?" asked Caroline with her old air of sharp
+suspicion, and something between challenge and dread of its being met.
+
+Rebecca shrank.
+
+"Nothing," said she.
+
+"Then I wouldn't keep speaking in such a fashion."
+
+Emma, returning from the closed door, said imperiously that it ought to
+be fixed, it shut so hard.
+
+"It will shrink enough after we have had the fire a few days," replied
+Caroline.  "If anything is done to it it will be too small; there will
+be a crack at the sill."
+
+"I think Henry ought to be ashamed of himself for talking as he did to
+Edward," said Mrs. Brigham abruptly, but in an almost inaudible voice.
+
+"Hush!" said Caroline, with a glance of actual fear at the closed door.
+
+"Nobody can hear with the door shut."
+
+"He must have heard it shut, and--"
+
+"Well, I can say what I want to before he comes down, and I am not
+afraid of him."
+
+"I don't know who is afraid of him!  What reason is there for anybody
+to be afraid of Henry?" demanded Caroline.
+
+Mrs. Brigham trembled before her sister's look.  Rebecca gasped again.
+"There isn't any reason, of course.  Why should there be?"
+
+"I wouldn't speak so, then.  Somebody might overhear you and think it
+was queer.  Miranda Joy is in the south parlour sewing, you know."
+
+"I thought she went upstairs to stitch on the machine."
+
+"She did, but she has come down again."
+
+"Well, she can't hear."
+
+"I say again I think Henry ought to be ashamed of himself.  I shouldn't
+think he'd ever get over it, having words with poor Edward the very
+night before he died.  Edward was enough sight better disposition than
+Henry, with all his faults.  I always thought a great deal of poor
+Edward, myself."
+
+Mrs. Brigham passed a large fluff of handkerchief across her eyes;
+Rebecca sobbed outright.
+
+"Rebecca," said Caroline admonishingly, keeping her mouth stiff and
+swallowing determinately.
+
+"I never heard him speak a cross word, unless he spoke cross to Henry
+that last night.  I don't know, but he did from what Rebecca
+overheard," said Emma.
+
+"Not so much cross as sort of soft, and sweet, and aggravating,"
+sniffled Rebecca.
+
+"He never raised his voice," said Caroline; "but he had his way."
+
+"He had a right to in this case."
+
+"Yes, he did."
+
+"He had as much of a right here as Henry," sobbed Rebecca, "and now
+he's gone, and he will never be in this home that poor father left him
+and the rest of us again."
+
+"What do you really think ailed Edward?" asked Emma in hardly more than
+a whisper.  She did not look at her sister.
+
+Caroline sat down in a nearby armchair, and clutched the arms
+convulsively until her thin knuckles whitened.
+
+"I told you," said she.
+
+Rebecca held her handkerchief over her mouth, and looked at them above
+it with terrified, streaming eyes.
+
+"I know you said that he had terrible pains in his stomach, and had
+spasms, but what do you think made him have them?"
+
+"Henry called it gastric trouble.  You know Edward has always had
+dyspepsia."
+
+Mrs. Brigham hesitated a moment.  "Was there any talk of
+an--examination?" said she.
+
+Then Caroline turned on her fiercely.
+
+"No," said she in a terrible voice.  "No."
+
+The three sisters' souls seemed to meet on one common ground of
+terrified understanding though their eyes.  The old-fashioned latch of
+the door was heard to rattle, and a push from without made the door
+shake ineffectually.  "It's Henry," Rebecca sighed rather than
+whispered.  Mrs. Brigham settled herself after a noiseless rush across
+the floor into her rocking-chair again, and was swaying back and forth
+with her head comfortably leaning back, when the door at last yielded
+and Henry Glynn entered.  He cast a covertly sharp, comprehensive
+glance at Mrs. Brigham with her elaborate calm; at Rebecca quietly
+huddled in the corner of the sofa with her handkerchief to her face and
+only one small reddened ear as attentive as a dog's uncovered and
+revealing her alertness for his presence; at Caroline sitting with a
+strained composure in her armchair by the stove.  She met his eyes
+quite firmly with a look of inscrutable fear, and defiance of the fear
+and of him.
+
+Henry Glynn looked more like this sister than the others.  Both had the
+same hard delicacy of form and feature, both were tall and almost
+emaciated, both had a sparse growth of gray blond hair far back from
+high intellectual foreheads, both had an almost noble aquilinity of
+feature.  They confronted each other with the pitiless immovability of
+two statues in whose marble lineaments emotions were fixed for all
+eternity.
+
+Then Henry Glynn smiled and the smile transformed his face.  He looked
+suddenly years younger, and an almost boyish recklessness and
+irresolution appeared in his face.  He flung himself into a chair with
+a gesture which was bewildering from its incongruity with his general
+appearance.  He leaned his head back, flung one leg over the other, and
+looked laughingly at Mrs. Brigham.
+
+"I declare, Emma, you grow younger every year," he said.
+
+She flushed a little, and her placid mouth widened at the corners. She
+was susceptible to praise.
+
+"Our thoughts to-day ought to belong to the one of us who will NEVER
+grow older," said Caroline in a hard voice.
+
+Henry looked at her, still smiling.  "Of course, we none of us forget
+that," said he, in a deep, gentle voice, "but we have to speak to the
+living, Caroline, and I have not seen Emma for a long time, and the
+living are as dear as the dead."
+
+"Not to me," said Caroline.
+
+She rose, and went abruptly out of the room again.  Rebecca also rose
+and hurried after her, sobbing loudly.
+
+Henry looked slowly after them.
+
+"Caroline is completely unstrung," said he.  Mrs. Brigham rocked. A
+confidence in him inspired by his manner was stealing over her. Out of
+that confidence she spoke quite easily and naturally.
+
+"His death was very sudden," said she.
+
+Henry's eyelids quivered slightly but his gaze was unswerving.
+
+"Yes," said he; "it was very sudden.  He was sick only a few hours."
+
+"What did you call it?"
+
+"Gastric."
+
+"You did not think of an examination?"
+
+"There was no need.  I am perfectly certain as to the cause of his
+death."
+
+Suddenly Mrs. Brigham felt a creep as of some live horror over her very
+soul.  Her flesh prickled with cold, before an inflection of his voice.
+She rose, tottering on weak knees.
+
+"Where are you going?" asked Henry in a strange, breathless voice.
+
+Mrs. Brigham said something incoherent about some sewing which she had
+to do, some black for the funeral, and was out of the room. She went up
+to the front chamber which she occupied.  Caroline was there.  She went
+close to her and took her hands, and the two sisters looked at each
+other.
+
+"Don't speak, don't, I won't have it!" said Caroline finally in an
+awful whisper.
+
+"I won't," replied Emma.
+
+That afternoon the three sisters were in the study, the large front
+room on the ground floor across the hall from the south parlour, when
+the dusk deepened.
+
+Mrs. Brigham was hemming some black material.  She sat close to the
+west window for the waning light.  At last she laid her work on her lap.
+
+"It's no use, I cannot see to sew another stitch until we have a
+light," said she.
+
+Caroline, who was writing some letters at the table, turned to Rebecca,
+in her usual place on the sofa.
+
+"Rebecca, you had better get a lamp," she said.
+
+Rebecca started up; even in the dusk her face showed her agitation.
+
+"It doesn't seem to me that we need a lamp quite yet," she said in a
+piteous, pleading voice like a child's.
+
+"Yes, we do," returned Mrs. Brigham peremptorily.  "We must have a
+light.  I must finish this to-night or I can't go to the funeral, and I
+can't see to sew another stitch."
+
+"Caroline can see to write letters, and she is farther from the window
+than you are," said Rebecca.
+
+"Are you trying to save kerosene or are you lazy, Rebecca Glynn?" cried
+Mrs. Brigham.  "I can go and get the light myself, but I have this work
+all in my lap."
+
+Caroline's pen stopped scratching.
+
+"Rebecca, we must have the light," said she.
+
+"Had we better have it in here?" asked Rebecca weakly.
+
+"Of course!  Why not?" cried Caroline sternly.
+
+"I am sure I don't want to take my sewing into the other room, when it
+is all cleaned up for to-morrow," said Mrs. Brigham.
+
+"Why, I never heard such a to-do about lighting a lamp."
+
+Rebecca rose and left the room.  Presently she entered with a lamp--a
+large one with a white porcelain shade.  She set it on a table, an
+old-fashioned card-table which was placed against the opposite wall
+from the window.  That wall was clear of bookcases and books, which
+were only on three sides of the room.  That opposite wall was taken up
+with three doors, the one small space being occupied by the table.
+Above the table on the old-fashioned paper, of a white satin gloss,
+traversed by an indeterminate green scroll, hung quite high a small
+gilt and black-framed ivory miniature taken in her girlhood of the
+mother of the family.  When the lamp was set on the table beneath it,
+the tiny pretty face painted on the ivory seemed to gleam out with a
+look of intelligence.
+
+"What have you put that lamp over there for?" asked Mrs. Brigham, with
+more of impatience than her voice usually revealed.  "Why didn't you
+set it in the hall and have done with it.  Neither Caroline nor I can
+see if it is on that table."
+
+"I thought perhaps you would move," replied Rebecca hoarsely.
+
+"If I do move, we can't both sit at that table.  Caroline has her paper
+all spread around.  Why don't you set the lamp on the study table in
+the middle of the room, then we can both see?"
+
+Rebecca hesitated.  Her face was very pale.  She looked with an appeal
+that was fairly agonizing at her sister Caroline.
+
+"Why don't you put the lamp on this table, as she says?" asked
+Caroline, almost fiercely.  "Why do you act so, Rebecca?"
+
+"I should think you WOULD ask her that," said Mrs. Brigham.  "She
+doesn't act like herself at all."
+
+Rebecca took the lamp and set it on the table in the middle of the room
+without another word.  Then she turned her back upon it quickly and
+seated herself on the sofa, and placed a hand over her eyes as if to
+shade them, and remained so.
+
+"Does the light hurt your eyes, and is that the reason why you didn't
+want the lamp?" asked Mrs. Brigham kindly.
+
+"I always like to sit in the dark," replied Rebecca chokingly. Then she
+snatched her handkerchief hastily from her pocket and began to weep.
+Caroline continued to write, Mrs. Brigham to sew.
+
+Suddenly Mrs. Brigham as she sewed glanced at the opposite wall. The
+glance became a steady stare.  She looked intently, her work suspended
+in her hands.  Then she looked away again and took a few more stitches,
+then she looked again, and again turned to her task. At last she laid
+her work in her lap and stared concentratedly. She looked from the wall
+around the room, taking note of the various objects; she looked at the
+wall long and intently.  Then she turned to her sisters.
+
+"What IS that?" said she.
+
+"What?" asked Caroline harshly; her pen scratched loudly across the
+paper.
+
+Rebecca gave one of her convulsive gasps.
+
+"That strange shadow on the wall," replied Mrs. Brigham.
+
+Rebecca sat with her face hidden: Caroline dipped her pen in the
+inkstand.
+
+"Why don't you turn around and look?" asked Mrs. Brigham in a wondering
+and somewhat aggrieved way.
+
+"I am in a hurry to finish this letter, if Mrs. Wilson Ebbit is going
+to get word in time to come to the funeral," replied Caroline shortly.
+
+Mrs. Brigham rose, her work slipping to the floor, and she began
+walking around the room, moving various articles of furniture, with her
+eyes on the shadow.
+
+Then suddenly she shrieked out:
+
+"Look at this awful shadow!  What is it?  Caroline, look, look!
+Rebecca, look!  WHAT IS IT?"
+
+All Mrs. Brigham's triumphant placidity was gone.  Her handsome face
+was livid with horror.  She stood stiffly pointing at the shadow.
+
+"Look!" said she, pointing her finger at it.  "Look!  What is it?"
+
+Then Rebecca burst out in a wild wail after a shuddering glance at the
+wall:
+
+"Oh, Caroline, there it is again!  There it is again!"
+
+"Caroline Glynn, you look!" said Mrs. Brigham.  "Look!  What is that
+dreadful shadow?"
+
+Caroline rose, turned, and stood confronting the wall.
+
+"How should I know?" she said.
+
+"It has been there every night since he died," cried Rebecca.
+
+"Every night?"
+
+"Yes.  He died Thursday and this is Saturday; that makes three nights,"
+said Caroline rigidly.  She stood as if holding herself calm with a
+vise of concentrated will.
+
+"It--it looks like--like--" stammered Mrs. Brigham in a tone of intense
+horror.
+
+"I know what it looks like well enough," said Caroline.  "I've got eyes
+in my head."
+
+"It looks like Edward," burst out Rebecca in a sort of frenzy of fear.
+"Only--"
+
+"Yes, it does," assented Mrs. Brigham, whose horror-stricken tone
+matched her sister's, "only--  Oh, it is awful!  What is it, Caroline?"
+
+"I ask you again, how should I know?" replied Caroline.  "I see it
+there like you.  How should I know any more than you?"
+
+"It MUST be something in the room," said Mrs. Brigham, staring wildly
+around.
+
+"We moved everything in the room the first night it came," said
+Rebecca; "it is not anything in the room."
+
+Caroline turned upon her with a sort of fury.  "Of course it is
+something in the room," said she.  "How you act!  What do you mean by
+talking so?  Of course it is something in the room."
+
+"Of course, it is," agreed Mrs. Brigham, looking at Caroline
+suspiciously.  "Of course it must be.  It is only a coincidence. It
+just happens so.  Perhaps it is that fold of the window curtain that
+makes it.  It must be something in the room."
+
+"It is not anything in the room," repeated Rebecca with obstinate
+horror.
+
+The door opened suddenly and Henry Glynn entered.  He began to speak,
+then his eyes followed the direction of the others'.  He stood stock
+still staring at the shadow on the wall.  It was life size and
+stretched across the white parallelogram of a door, half across the
+wall space on which the picture hung.
+
+"What is that?" he demanded in a strange voice.
+
+"It must be due to something in the room," Mrs. Brigham said faintly.
+
+"It is not due to anything in the room," said Rebecca again with the
+shrill insistency of terror.
+
+"How you act, Rebecca Glynn," said Caroline.
+
+Henry Glynn stood and stared a moment longer.  His face showed a gamut
+of emotions--horror, conviction, then furious incredulity. Suddenly he
+began hastening hither and thither about the room.  He moved the
+furniture with fierce jerks, turning ever to see the effect upon the
+shadow on the wall.  Not a line of its terrible outlines wavered.
+
+"It must be something in the room!" he declared in a voice which seemed
+to snap like a lash.
+
+His face changed.  The inmost secrecy of his nature seemed evident
+until one almost lost sight of his lineaments.  Rebecca stood close to
+her sofa, regarding him with woeful, fascinated eyes.  Mrs. Brigham
+clutched Caroline's hand.  They both stood in a corner out of his way.
+For a few moments he raged about the room like a caged wild animal.  He
+moved every piece of furniture; when the moving of a piece did not
+affect the shadow, he flung it to the floor, the sisters watching.
+
+Then suddenly he desisted.  He laughed and began straightening the
+furniture which he had flung down.
+
+"What an absurdity," he said easily.  "Such a to-do about a shadow."
+
+"That's so," assented Mrs. Brigham, in a scared voice which she tried
+to make natural.  As she spoke she lifted a chair near her.
+
+"I think you have broken the chair that Edward was so fond of," said
+Caroline.
+
+Terror and wrath were struggling for expression on her face.  Her mouth
+was set, her eyes shrinking.  Henry lifted the chair with a show of
+anxiety.
+
+"Just as good as ever," he said pleasantly.  He laughed again, looking
+at his sisters.  "Did I scare you?" he said.  "I should think you might
+be used to me by this time.  You know my way of wanting to leap to the
+bottom of a mystery, and that shadow does look--queer, like--and I
+thought if there was any way of accounting for it I would like to
+without any delay."
+
+"You don't seem to have succeeded," remarked Caroline dryly, with a
+slight glance at the wall.
+
+Henry's eyes followed hers and he quivered perceptibly.
+
+"Oh, there is no accounting for shadows," he said, and he laughed
+again.  "A man is a fool to try to account for shadows."
+
+Then the supper bell rang, and they all left the room, but Henry kept
+his back to the wall, as did, indeed, the others.
+
+Mrs. Brigham pressed close to Caroline as she crossed the hall. "He
+looked like a demon!" she breathed in her ear.
+
+Henry led the way with an alert motion like a boy; Rebecca brought up
+the rear; she could scarcely walk, her knees trembled so.
+
+"I can't sit in that room again this evening," she whispered to
+Caroline after supper.
+
+"Very well, we will sit in the south room," replied Caroline.  "I think
+we will sit in the south parlour," she said aloud; "it isn't as damp as
+the study, and I have a cold."
+
+So they all sat in the south room with their sewing.  Henry read the
+newspaper, his chair drawn close to the lamp on the table. About nine
+o'clock he rose abruptly and crossed the hall to the study.  The three
+sisters looked at one another.  Mrs. Brigham rose, folded her rustling
+skirts compactly around her, and began tiptoeing toward the door.
+
+"What are you going to do?" inquired Rebecca agitatedly.
+
+"I am going to see what he is about," replied Mrs. Brigham cautiously.
+
+She pointed as she spoke to the study door across the hall; it was
+ajar.  Henry had striven to pull it together behind him, but it had
+somehow swollen beyond the limit with curious speed.  It was still ajar
+and a streak of light showed from top to bottom.  The hall lamp was not
+lit.
+
+"You had better stay where you are," said Caroline with guarded
+sharpness.
+
+"I am going to see," repeated Mrs. Brigham firmly.
+
+Then she folded her skirts so tightly that her bulk with its swelling
+curves was revealed in a black silk sheath, and she went with a slow
+toddle across the hall to the study door.  She stood there, her eye at
+the crack.
+
+In the south room Rebecca stopped sewing and sat watching with dilated
+eyes.  Caroline sewed steadily.  What Mrs. Brigham, standing at the
+crack in the study door, saw was this:
+
+Henry Glynn, evidently reasoning that the source of the strange shadow
+must be between the table on which the lamp stood and the wall, was
+making systematic passes and thrusts all over and through the
+intervening space with an old sword which had belonged to his father.
+Not an inch was left unpierced.  He seemed to have divided the space
+into mathematical sections.  He brandished the sword with a sort of
+cold fury and calculation; the blade gave out flashes of light, the
+shadow remained unmoved.  Mrs. Brigham, watching, felt herself cold
+with horror.
+
+Finally Henry ceased and stood with the sword in hand and raised as if
+to strike, surveying the shadow on the wall threateningly.  Mrs.
+Brigham toddled back across the hall and shut the south room door
+behind her before she related what she had seen.
+
+"He looked like a demon!" she said again.  "Have you got any of that
+old wine in the house, Caroline?  I don't feel as if I could stand much
+more."
+
+Indeed, she looked overcome.  Her handsome placid face was worn and
+strained and pale.
+
+"Yes, there's plenty," said Caroline; "you can have some when you go to
+bed."
+
+"I think we had all better take some," said Mrs. Brigham.  "Oh, my God,
+Caroline, what--"
+
+"Don't ask and don't speak," said Caroline.
+
+"No, I am not going to," replied Mrs. Brigham; "but--"
+
+Rebecca moaned aloud.
+
+"What are you doing that for?" asked Caroline harshly.
+
+"Poor Edward," returned Rebecca.
+
+"That is all you have to groan for," said Caroline.  "There is nothing
+else."
+
+"I am going to bed," said Mrs. Brigham.  "I sha'n't be able to be at
+the funeral if I don't."
+
+Soon the three sisters went to their chambers and the south parlour was
+deserted.  Caroline called to Henry in the study to put out the light
+before he came upstairs.  They had been gone about an hour when he came
+into the room bringing the lamp which had stood in the study.  He set
+it on the table and waited a few minutes, pacing up and down.  His face
+was terrible, his fair complexion showed livid; his blue eyes seemed
+dark blanks of awful reflections.
+
+Then he took the lamp up and returned to the library.  He set the lamp
+on the centre table, and the shadow sprang out on the wall. Again he
+studied the furniture and moved it about, but deliberately, with none
+of his former frenzy.  Nothing affected the shadow.  Then he returned
+to the south room with the lamp and again waited.  Again he returned to
+the study and placed the lamp on the table, and the shadow sprang out
+upon the wall.  It was midnight before he went upstairs.  Mrs. Brigham
+and the other sisters, who could not sleep, heard him.
+
+The next day was the funeral.  That evening the family sat in the south
+room.  Some relatives were with them.  Nobody entered the study until
+Henry carried a lamp in there after the others had retired for the
+night.  He saw again the shadow on the wall leap to an awful life
+before the light.
+
+The next morning at breakfast Henry Glynn announced that he had to go
+to the city for three days.  The sisters looked at him with surprise.
+He very seldom left home, and just now his practice had been neglected
+on account of Edward's death.  He was a physician.
+
+"How can you leave your patients now?" asked Mrs. Brigham wonderingly.
+
+"I don't know how to, but there is no other way," replied Henry easily.
+"I have had a telegram from Doctor Mitford."
+
+"Consultation?" inquired Mrs. Brigham.
+
+"I have business," replied Henry.
+
+Doctor Mitford was an old classmate of his who lived in a neighbouring
+city and who occasionally called upon him in the case of a consultation.
+
+After he had gone Mrs. Brigham said to Caroline that after all Henry
+had not said that he was going to consult with Doctor Mitford, and she
+thought it very strange.
+
+"Everything is very strange," said Rebecca with a shudder.
+
+"What do you mean?" inquired Caroline sharply.
+
+"Nothing," replied Rebecca.
+
+Nobody entered the library that day, nor the next, nor the next. The
+third day Henry was expected home, but he did not arrive and the last
+train from the city had come.
+
+"I call it pretty queer work," said Mrs. Brigham.  "The idea of a
+doctor leaving his patients for three days anyhow, at such a time as
+this, and I know he has some very sick ones; he said so.  And the idea
+of a consultation lasting three days!  There is no sense in it, and NOW
+he has not come.  I don't understand it, for my part."
+
+"I don't either," said Rebecca.
+
+They were all in the south parlour.  There was no light in the study
+opposite, and the door was ajar.
+
+Presently Mrs. Brigham rose--she could not have told why; something
+seemed to impel her, some will outside her own.  She went out of the
+room, again wrapping her rustling skirts around that she might pass
+noiselessly, and began pushing at the swollen door of the study.
+
+"She has not got any lamp," said Rebecca in a shaking voice.
+
+Caroline, who was writing letters, rose again, took a lamp (there were
+two in the room) and followed her sister.  Rebecca had risen, but she
+stood trembling, not venturing to follow.
+
+The doorbell rang, but the others did not hear it; it was on the south
+door on the other side of the house from the study.  Rebecca, after
+hesitating until the bell rang the second time, went to the door; she
+remembered that the servant was out.
+
+Caroline and her sister Emma entered the study.  Caroline set the lamp
+on the table.  They looked at the wall.  "Oh, my God," gasped Mrs.
+Brigham, "there are--there are TWO--shadows."  The sisters stood
+clutching each other, staring at the awful things on the wall.  Then
+Rebecca came in, staggering, with a telegram in her hand.  "Here is--a
+telegram," she gasped.  "Henry is--dead."
+
+
+
+
+LUELLA MILLER
+
+
+Close to the village street stood the one-story house in which Luella
+Miller, who had an evil name in the village, had dwelt.  She had been
+dead for years, yet there were those in the village who, in spite of
+the clearer light which comes on a vantage-point from a long-past
+danger, half believed in the tale which they had heard from their
+childhood.  In their hearts, although they scarcely would have owned
+it, was a survival of the wild horror and frenzied fear of their
+ancestors who had dwelt in the same age with Luella Miller.  Young
+people even would stare with a shudder at the old house as they passed,
+and children never played around it as was their wont around an
+untenanted building.  Not a window in the old Miller house was broken:
+the panes reflected the morning sunlight in patches of emerald and
+blue, and the latch of the sagging front door was never lifted,
+although no bolt secured it.  Since Luella Miller had been carried out
+of it, the house had had no tenant except one friendless old soul who
+had no choice between that and the far-off shelter of the open sky.
+This old woman, who had survived her kindred and friends, lived in the
+house one week, then one morning no smoke came out of the chimney, and
+a body of neighbours, a score strong, entered and found her dead in her
+bed. There were dark whispers as to the cause of her death, and there
+were those who testified to an expression of fear so exalted that it
+showed forth the state of the departing soul upon the dead face. The
+old woman had been hale and hearty when she entered the house, and in
+seven days she was dead; it seemed that she had fallen a victim to some
+uncanny power.  The minister talked in the pulpit with covert severity
+against the sin of superstition; still the belief prevailed.  Not a
+soul in the village but would have chosen the almshouse rather than
+that dwelling.  No vagrant, if he heard the tale, would seek shelter
+beneath that old roof, unhallowed by nearly half a century of
+superstitious fear.
+
+There was only one person in the village who had actually known Luella
+Miller.  That person was a woman well over eighty, but a marvel of
+vitality and unextinct youth.  Straight as an arrow, with the spring of
+one recently let loose from the bow of life, she moved about the
+streets, and she always went to church, rain or shine.  She had never
+married, and had lived alone for years in a house across the road from
+Luella Miller's.
+
+This woman had none of the garrulousness of age, but never in all her
+life had she ever held her tongue for any will save her own, and she
+never spared the truth when she essayed to present it.  She it was who
+bore testimony to the life, evil, though possibly wittingly or
+designedly so, of Luella Miller, and to her personal appearance.  When
+this old woman spoke--and she had the gift of description, although her
+thoughts were clothed in the rude vernacular of her native village--one
+could seem to see Luella Miller as she had really looked.  According to
+this woman, Lydia Anderson by name, Luella Miller had been a beauty of
+a type rather unusual in New England.  She had been a slight, pliant
+sort of creature, as ready with a strong yielding to fate and as
+unbreakable as a willow.  She had glimmering lengths of straight, fair
+hair, which she wore softly looped round a long, lovely face. She had
+blue eyes full of soft pleading, little slender, clinging hands, and a
+wonderful grace of motion and attitude.
+
+"Luella Miller used to sit in a way nobody else could if they sat up
+and studied a week of Sundays," said Lydia Anderson, "and it was a
+sight to see her walk.  If one of them willows over there on the edge
+of the brook could start up and get its roots free of the ground, and
+move off, it would go just the way Luella Miller used to.  She had a
+green shot silk she used to wear, too, and a hat with green ribbon
+streamers, and a lace veil blowing across her face and out sideways,
+and a green ribbon flyin' from her waist. That was what she came out
+bride in when she married Erastus Miller.  Her name before she was
+married was Hill.  There was always a sight of "l's" in her name,
+married or single.  Erastus Miller was good lookin', too, better
+lookin' than Luella. Sometimes I used to think that Luella wa'n't so
+handsome after all. Erastus just about worshiped her.  I used to know
+him pretty well. He lived next door to me, and we went to school
+together.  Folks used to say he was waitin' on me, but he wa'n't.  I
+never thought he was except once or twice when he said things that some
+girls might have suspected meant somethin'.  That was before Luella
+came here to teach the district school.  It was funny how she came to
+get it, for folks said she hadn't any education, and that one of the
+big girls, Lottie Henderson, used to do all the teachin' for her, while
+she sat back and did embroidery work on a cambric pocket-handkerchief.
+Lottie Henderson was a real smart girl, a splendid scholar, and she
+just set her eyes by Luella, as all the girls did.  Lottie would have
+made a real smart woman, but she died when Luella had been here about a
+year--just faded away and died: nobody knew what ailed her.  She
+dragged herself to that schoolhouse and helped Luella teach till the
+very last minute.  The committee all knew how Luella didn't do much of
+the work herself, but they winked at it.  It wa'n't long after Lottie
+died that Erastus married her.  I always thought he hurried it up
+because she wa'n't fit to teach.  One of the big boys used to help her
+after Lottie died, but he hadn't much government, and the school didn't
+do very well, and Luella might have had to give it up, for the
+committee couldn't have shut their eyes to things much longer.  The boy
+that helped her was a real honest, innocent sort of fellow, and he was
+a good scholar, too.  Folks said he overstudied, and that was the
+reason he was took crazy the year after Luella married, but I don't
+know.  And I don't know what made Erastus Miller go into consumption of
+the blood the year after he was married: consumption wa'n't in his
+family.  He just grew weaker and weaker, and went almost bent double
+when he tried to wait on Luella, and he spoke feeble, like an old man.
+He worked terrible hard till the last trying to save up a little to
+leave Luella.  I've seen him out in the worst storms on a wood-sled--he
+used to cut and sell wood--and he was hunched up on top lookin' more
+dead than alive.  Once I couldn't stand it: I went over and helped him
+pitch some wood on the cart--I was always strong in my arms.  I
+wouldn't stop for all he told me to, and I guess he was glad enough for
+the help.  That was only a week before he died.  He fell on the kitchen
+floor while he was gettin' breakfast.  He always got the breakfast and
+let Luella lay abed.  He did all the sweepin' and the washin' and the
+ironin' and most of the cookin'.  He couldn't bear to have Luella lift
+her finger, and she let him do for her.  She lived like a queen for all
+the work she did.  She didn't even do her sewin'. She said it made her
+shoulder ache to sew, and poor Erastus's sister Lily used to do all her
+sewin'.  She wa'n't able to, either; she was never strong in her back,
+but she did it beautifully.  She had to, to suit Luella, she was so
+dreadful particular.  I never saw anythin' like the fagottin' and
+hemstitchin' that Lily Miller did for Luella.  She made all Luella's
+weddin' outfit, and that green silk dress, after Maria Babbit cut it.
+Maria she cut it for nothin', and she did a lot more cuttin' and
+fittin' for nothin' for Luella, too.  Lily Miller went to live with
+Luella after Erastus died.  She gave up her home, though she was real
+attached to it and wa'n't a mite afraid to stay alone.  She rented it
+and she went to live with Luella right away after the funeral."
+
+Then this old woman, Lydia Anderson, who remembered Luella Miller,
+would go on to relate the story of Lily Miller.  It seemed that on the
+removal of Lily Miller to the house of her dead brother, to live with
+his widow, the village people first began to talk.  This Lily Miller
+had been hardly past her first youth, and a most robust and blooming
+woman, rosy-cheeked, with curls of strong, black hair overshadowing
+round, candid temples and bright dark eyes.  It was not six months
+after she had taken up her residence with her sister-in-law that her
+rosy colour faded and her pretty curves became wan hollows.  White
+shadows began to show in the black rings of her hair, and the light
+died out of her eyes, her features sharpened, and there were pathetic
+lines at her mouth, which yet wore always an expression of utter
+sweetness and even happiness. She was devoted to her sister; there was
+no doubt that she loved her with her whole heart, and was perfectly
+content in her service. It was her sole anxiety lest she should die and
+leave her alone.
+
+"The way Lily Miller used to talk about Luella was enough to make you
+mad and enough to make you cry," said Lydia Anderson.  "I've been in
+there sometimes toward the last when she was too feeble to cook and
+carried her some blanc-mange or custard--somethin' I thought she might
+relish, and she'd thank me, and when I asked her how she was, say she
+felt better than she did yesterday, and asked me if I didn't think she
+looked better, dreadful pitiful, and say poor Luella had an awful time
+takin' care of her and doin' the work--she wa'n't strong enough to do
+anythin'--when all the time Luella wa'n't liftin' her finger and poor
+Lily didn't get any care except what the neighbours gave her, and
+Luella eat up everythin' that was carried in for Lily.  I had it real
+straight that she did. Luella used to just sit and cry and do nothin'.
+She did act real fond of Lily, and she pined away considerable, too.
+There was those that thought she'd go into a decline herself.  But
+after Lily died, her Aunt Abby Mixter came, and then Luella picked up
+and grew as fat and rosy as ever.  But poor Aunt Abby begun to droop
+just the way Lily had, and I guess somebody wrote to her married
+daughter, Mrs. Sam Abbot, who lived in Barre, for she wrote her mother
+that she must leave right away and come and make her a visit, but Aunt
+Abby wouldn't go.  I can see her now.  She was a real good-lookin'
+woman, tall and large, with a big, square face and a high forehead that
+looked of itself kind of benevolent and good.  She just tended out on
+Luella as if she had been a baby, and when her married daughter sent
+for her she wouldn't stir one inch. She'd always thought a lot of her
+daughter, too, but she said Luella needed her and her married daughter
+didn't.  Her daughter kept writin' and writin', but it didn't do any
+good.  Finally she came, and when she saw how bad her mother looked,
+she broke down and cried and all but went on her knees to have her come
+away.  She spoke her mind out to Luella, too.  She told her that she'd
+killed her husband and everybody that had anythin' to do with her, and
+she'd thank her to leave her mother alone.  Luella went into hysterics,
+and Aunt Abby was so frightened that she called me after her daughter
+went.  Mrs. Sam Abbot she went away fairly cryin' out loud in the
+buggy, the neighbours heard her, and well she might, for she never saw
+her mother again alive.  I went in that night when Aunt Abby called for
+me, standin' in the door with her little green-checked shawl over her
+head.  I can see her now.  'Do come over here, Miss Anderson,' she sung
+out, kind of gasping for breath.  I didn't stop for anythin'.  I put
+over as fast as I could, and when I got there, there was Luella
+laughin' and cryin' all together, and Aunt Abby trying to hush her, and
+all the time she herself was white as a sheet and shakin' so she could
+hardly stand.  'For the land sakes, Mrs. Mixter,' says I, 'you look
+worse than she does.  You ain't fit to be up out of your bed.'
+
+"'Oh, there ain't anythin' the matter with me,' says she.  Then she
+went on talkin' to Luella.  'There, there, don't, don't, poor little
+lamb,' says she.  'Aunt Abby is here.  She ain't goin' away and leave
+you.  Don't, poor little lamb.'
+
+"'Do leave her with me, Mrs. Mixter, and you get back to bed,' says I,
+for Aunt Abby had been layin' down considerable lately, though somehow
+she contrived to do the work.
+
+"'I'm well enough,' says she.  'Don't you think she had better have the
+doctor, Miss Anderson?'
+
+"'The doctor,' says I, 'I think YOU had better have the doctor.  I
+think you need him much worse than some folks I could mention.' And I
+looked right straight at Luella Miller laughin' and cryin' and goin' on
+as if she was the centre of all creation.  All the time she was actin'
+so--seemed as if she was too sick to sense anythin'--she was keepin' a
+sharp lookout as to how we took it out of the corner of one eye.  I see
+her.  You could never cheat me about Luella Miller.  Finally I got real
+mad and I run home and I got a bottle of valerian I had, and I poured
+some boilin' hot water on a handful of catnip, and I mixed up that
+catnip tea with most half a wineglass of valerian, and I went with it
+over to Luella's. I marched right up to Luella, a-holdin' out of that
+cup, all smokin'.  'Now,' says I, 'Luella Miller, 'YOU SWALLER THIS!'
+
+"'What is--what is it, oh, what is it?' she sort of screeches out. Then
+she goes off a-laughin' enough to kill.
+
+"'Poor lamb, poor little lamb,' says Aunt Abby, standin' over her, all
+kind of tottery, and tryin' to bathe her head with camphor.
+
+"'YOU SWALLER THIS RIGHT DOWN,' says I.  And I didn't waste any
+ceremony.  I just took hold of Luella Miller's chin and I tipped her
+head back, and I caught her mouth open with laughin', and I clapped
+that cup to her lips, and I fairly hollered at her: 'Swaller, swaller,
+swaller!' and she gulped it right down.  She had to, and I guess it did
+her good.  Anyhow, she stopped cryin' and laughin' and let me put her
+to bed, and she went to sleep like a baby inside of half an hour.  That
+was more than poor Aunt Abby did.  She lay awake all that night and I
+stayed with her, though she tried not to have me; said she wa'n't sick
+enough for watchers. But I stayed, and I made some good cornmeal gruel
+and I fed her a teaspoon every little while all night long.  It seemed
+to me as if she was jest dyin' from bein' all wore out.  In the mornin'
+as soon as it was light I run over to the Bisbees and sent Johnny
+Bisbee for the doctor.  I told him to tell the doctor to hurry, and he
+come pretty quick.  Poor Aunt Abby didn't seem to know much of anythin'
+when he got there.  You couldn't hardly tell she breathed, she was so
+used up.  When the doctor had gone, Luella came into the room lookin'
+like a baby in her ruffled nightgown.  I can see her now.  Her eyes
+were as blue and her face all pink and white like a blossom, and she
+looked at Aunt Abby in the bed sort of innocent and surprised.  'Why,'
+says she, 'Aunt Abby ain't got up yet?'
+
+"'No, she ain't,' says I, pretty short.
+
+"'I thought I didn't smell the coffee,' says Luella.
+
+"'Coffee,' says I.  'I guess if you have coffee this mornin' you'll
+make it yourself.'
+
+"'I never made the coffee in all my life,' says she, dreadful
+astonished.  'Erastus always made the coffee as long as he lived, and
+then Lily she made it, and then Aunt Abby made it.  I don't believe I
+CAN make the coffee, Miss Anderson.'
+
+"'You can make it or go without, jest as you please,' says I.
+
+"'Ain't Aunt Abby goin' to get up?' says she.
+
+"'I guess she won't get up,' says I, 'sick as she is.'  I was gettin'
+madder and madder.  There was somethin' about that little
+pink-and-white thing standin' there and talkin' about coffee, when she
+had killed so many better folks than she was, and had jest killed
+another, that made me feel 'most as if I wished somebody would up and
+kill her before she had a chance to do any more harm.
+
+"'Is Aunt Abby sick?' says Luella, as if she was sort of aggrieved and
+injured.
+
+"'Yes,' says I, 'she's sick, and she's goin' to die, and then you'll be
+left alone, and you'll have to do for yourself and wait on yourself, or
+do without things.'  I don't know but I was sort of hard, but it was
+the truth, and if I was any harder than Luella Miller had been I'll
+give up.  I ain't never been sorry that I said it.  Well, Luella, she
+up and had hysterics again at that, and I jest let her have 'em.  All I
+did was to bundle her into the room on the other side of the entry
+where Aunt Abby couldn't hear her, if she wa'n't past it--I don't know
+but she was--and set her down hard in a chair and told her not to come
+back into the other room, and she minded.  She had her hysterics in
+there till she got tired. When she found out that nobody was comin' to
+coddle her and do for her she stopped.  At least I suppose she did.  I
+had all I could do with poor Aunt Abby tryin' to keep the breath of
+life in her.  The doctor had told me that she was dreadful low, and
+give me some very strong medicine to give to her in drops real often,
+and told me real particular about the nourishment.  Well, I did as he
+told me real faithful till she wa'n't able to swaller any longer.  Then
+I had her daughter sent for.  I had begun to realize that she wouldn't
+last any time at all.  I hadn't realized it before, though I spoke to
+Luella the way I did.  The doctor he came, and Mrs. Sam Abbot, but when
+she got there it was too late; her mother was dead. Aunt Abby's
+daughter just give one look at her mother layin' there, then she turned
+sort of sharp and sudden and looked at me.
+
+"'Where is she?' says she, and I knew she meant Luella.
+
+"'She's out in the kitchen,' says I.  'She's too nervous to see folks
+die.  She's afraid it will make her sick.'
+
+"The Doctor he speaks up then.  He was a young man.  Old Doctor Park
+had died the year before, and this was a young fellow just out of
+college.  'Mrs. Miller is not strong,' says he, kind of severe, 'and
+she is quite right in not agitating herself.'
+
+"'You are another, young man; she's got her pretty claw on you,' thinks
+I, but I didn't say anythin' to him.  I just said over to Mrs. Sam
+Abbot that Luella was in the kitchen, and Mrs. Sam Abbot she went out
+there, and I went, too, and I never heard anythin' like the way she
+talked to Luella Miller.  I felt pretty hard to Luella myself, but this
+was more than I ever would have dared to say.  Luella she was too
+scared to go into hysterics.  She jest flopped.  She seemed to jest
+shrink away to nothin' in that kitchen chair, with Mrs. Sam Abbot
+standin' over her and talkin' and tellin' her the truth.  I guess the
+truth was most too much for her and no mistake, because Luella
+presently actually did faint away, and there wa'n't any sham about it,
+the way I always suspected there was about them hysterics.  She fainted
+dead away and we had to lay her flat on the floor, and the Doctor he
+came runnin' out and he said somethin' about a weak heart dreadful
+fierce to Mrs. Sam Abbot, but she wa'n't a mite scared.  She faced him
+jest as white as even Luella was layin' there lookin' like death and
+the Doctor feelin' of her pulse.
+
+"'Weak heart,' says she, 'weak heart; weak fiddlesticks!  There ain't
+nothin' weak about that woman.  She's got strength enough to hang onto
+other folks till she kills 'em.  Weak?  It was my poor mother that was
+weak: this woman killed her as sure as if she had taken a knife to her.'
+
+"But the Doctor he didn't pay much attention.  He was bendin' over
+Luella layin' there with her yellow hair all streamin' and her pretty
+pink-and-white face all pale, and her blue eyes like stars gone out,
+and he was holdin' onto her hand and smoothin' her forehead, and
+tellin' me to get the brandy in Aunt Abby's room, and I was sure as I
+wanted to be that Luella had got somebody else to hang onto, now Aunt
+Abby was gone, and I thought of poor Erastus Miller, and I sort of
+pitied the poor young Doctor, led away by a pretty face, and I made up
+my mind I'd see what I could do.
+
+"I waited till Aunt Abby had been dead and buried about a month, and
+the Doctor was goin' to see Luella steady and folks were beginnin' to
+talk; then one evenin', when I knew the Doctor had been called out of
+town and wouldn't be round, I went over to Luella's.  I found her all
+dressed up in a blue muslin with white polka dots on it, and her hair
+curled jest as pretty, and there wa'n't a young girl in the place could
+compare with her.  There was somethin' about Luella Miller seemed to
+draw the heart right out of you, but she didn't draw it out of ME.  She
+was settin' rocking in the chair by her sittin'-room window, and Maria
+Brown had gone home.  Maria Brown had been in to help her, or rather to
+do the work, for Luella wa'n't helped when she didn't do anythin'.
+Maria Brown was real capable and she didn't have any ties; she wa'n't
+married, and lived alone, so she'd offered.  I couldn't see why she
+should do the work any more than Luella; she wa'n't any too strong; but
+she seemed to think she could and Luella seemed to think so, too, so
+she went over and did all the work--washed, and ironed, and baked,
+while Luella sat and rocked.  Maria didn't live long afterward.  She
+began to fade away just the same fashion the others had.  Well, she was
+warned, but she acted real mad when folks said anythin': said Luella
+was a poor, abused woman, too delicate to help herself, and they'd
+ought to be ashamed, and if she died helpin' them that couldn't help
+themselves she would--and she did.
+
+"'I s'pose Maria has gone home,' says I to Luella, when I had gone in
+and sat down opposite her.
+
+"'Yes, Maria went half an hour ago, after she had got supper and washed
+the dishes,' says Luella, in her pretty way.
+
+"'I suppose she has got a lot of work to do in her own house to-night,'
+says I, kind of bitter, but that was all thrown away on Luella Miller.
+It seemed to her right that other folks that wa'n't any better able
+than she was herself should wait on her, and she couldn't get it
+through her head that anybody should think it WA'N'T right.
+
+"'Yes,' says Luella, real sweet and pretty, 'yes, she said she had to
+do her washin' to-night.  She has let it go for a fortnight along of
+comin' over here.'
+
+"'Why don't she stay home and do her washin' instead of comin' over
+here and doin' YOUR work, when you are just as well able, and enough
+sight more so, than she is to do it?' says I.
+
+"Then Luella she looked at me like a baby who has a rattle shook at it.
+She sort of laughed as innocent as you please.  'Oh, I can't do the
+work myself, Miss Anderson,' says she.  'I never did.  Maria HAS to do
+it.'
+
+"Then I spoke out: 'Has to do it I' says I.  'Has to do it!'  She don't
+have to do it, either.  Maria Brown has her own home and enough to live
+on.  She ain't beholden to you to come over here and slave for you and
+kill herself.'
+
+"Luella she jest set and stared at me for all the world like a
+doll-baby that was so abused that it was comin' to life.
+
+"'Yes,' says I, 'she's killin' herself.  She's goin' to die just the
+way Erastus did, and Lily, and your Aunt Abby.  You're killin' her jest
+as you did them.  I don't know what there is about you, but you seem to
+bring a curse,' says I.  'You kill everybody that is fool enough to
+care anythin' about you and do for you.'
+
+"She stared at me and she was pretty pale.
+
+"'And Maria ain't the only one you're goin' to kill,' says I. 'You're
+goin' to kill Doctor Malcom before you're done with him.'
+
+"Then a red colour came flamin' all over her face.  'I ain't goin' to
+kill him, either,' says she, and she begun to cry.
+
+"'Yes, you BE!' says I.  Then I spoke as I had never spoke before. You
+see, I felt it on account of Erastus.  I told her that she hadn't any
+business to think of another man after she'd been married to one that
+had died for her: that she was a dreadful woman; and she was, that's
+true enough, but sometimes I have wondered lately if she knew it--if
+she wa'n't like a baby with scissors in its hand cuttin' everybody
+without knowin' what it was doin'.
+
+"Luella she kept gettin' paler and paler, and she never took her eyes
+off my face.  There was somethin' awful about the way she looked at me
+and never spoke one word.  After awhile I quit talkin' and I went home.
+I watched that night, but her lamp went out before nine o'clock, and
+when Doctor Malcom came drivin' past and sort of slowed up he see there
+wa'n't any light and he drove along. I saw her sort of shy out of
+meetin' the next Sunday, too, so he shouldn't go home with her, and I
+begun to think mebbe she did have some conscience after all.  It was
+only a week after that that Maria Brown died--sort of sudden at the
+last, though everybody had seen it was comin'.  Well, then there was a
+good deal of feelin' and pretty dark whispers.  Folks said the days of
+witchcraft had come again, and they were pretty shy of Luella.  She
+acted sort of offish to the Doctor and he didn't go there, and there
+wa'n't anybody to do anythin' for her.  I don't know how she DID get
+along.  I wouldn't go in there and offer to help her--not because I was
+afraid of dyin' like the rest, but I thought she was just as well able
+to do her own work as I was to do it for her, and I thought it was
+about time that she did it and stopped killin' other folks.  But it
+wa'n't very long before folks began to say that Luella herself was
+goin' into a decline jest the way her husband, and Lily, and Aunt Abby
+and the others had, and I saw myself that she looked pretty bad.  I
+used to see her goin' past from the store with a bundle as if she could
+hardly crawl, but I remembered how Erastus used to wait and 'tend when
+he couldn't hardly put one foot before the other, and I didn't go out
+to help her.
+
+"But at last one afternoon I saw the Doctor come drivin' up like mad
+with his medicine chest, and Mrs. Babbit came in after supper and said
+that Luella was real sick.
+
+"'I'd offer to go in and nurse her,' says she, 'but I've got my
+children to consider, and mebbe it ain't true what they say, but it's
+queer how many folks that have done for her have died.'
+
+"I didn't say anythin', but I considered how she had been Erastus's
+wife and how he had set his eyes by her, and I made up my mind to go in
+the next mornin', unless she was better, and see what I could do; but
+the next mornin' I see her at the window, and pretty soon she came
+steppin' out as spry as you please, and a little while afterward Mrs.
+Babbit came in and told me that the Doctor had got a girl from out of
+town, a Sarah Jones, to come there, and she said she was pretty sure
+that the Doctor was goin' to marry Luella.
+
+"I saw him kiss her in the door that night myself, and I knew it was
+true.  The woman came that afternoon, and the way she flew around was a
+caution.  I don't believe Luella had swept since Maria died.  She swept
+and dusted, and washed and ironed; wet clothes and dusters and carpets
+were flyin' over there all day, and every time Luella set her foot out
+when the Doctor wa'n't there there was that Sarah Jones helpin' of her
+up and down the steps, as if she hadn't learned to walk.
+
+"Well, everybody knew that Luella and the Doctor were goin' to be
+married, but it wa'n't long before they began to talk about his lookin'
+so poorly, jest as they had about the others; and they talked about
+Sarah Jones, too.
+
+"Well, the Doctor did die, and he wanted to be married first, so as to
+leave what little he had to Luella, but he died before the minister
+could get there, and Sarah Jones died a week afterward.
+
+"Well, that wound up everything for Luella Miller.  Not another soul in
+the whole town would lift a finger for her.  There got to be a sort of
+panic.  Then she began to droop in good earnest.  She used to have to
+go to the store herself, for Mrs. Babbit was afraid to let Tommy go for
+her, and I've seen her goin' past and stoppin' every two or three steps
+to rest.  Well, I stood it as long as I could, but one day I see her
+comin' with her arms full and stoppin' to lean against the Babbit
+fence, and I run out and took her bundles and carried them to her
+house.  Then I went home and never spoke one word to her though she
+called after me dreadful kind of pitiful.  Well, that night I was taken
+sick with a chill, and I was sick as I wanted to be for two weeks.
+Mrs. Babbit had seen me run out to help Luella and she came in and told
+me I was goin' to die on account of it.  I didn't know whether I was or
+not, but I considered I had done right by Erastus's wife.
+
+"That last two weeks Luella she had a dreadful hard time, I guess. She
+was pretty sick, and as near as I could make out nobody dared go near
+her.  I don't know as she was really needin' anythin' very much, for
+there was enough to eat in her house and it was warm weather, and she
+made out to cook a little flour gruel every day, I know, but I guess
+she had a hard time, she that had been so petted and done for all her
+life.
+
+"When I got so I could go out, I went over there one morning.  Mrs.
+Babbit had just come in to say she hadn't seen any smoke and she didn't
+know but it was somebody's duty to go in, but she couldn't help
+thinkin' of her children, and I got right up, though I hadn't been out
+of the house for two weeks, and I went in there, and Luella she was
+layin' on the bed, and she was dyin'.
+
+"She lasted all that day and into the night.  But I sat there after the
+new doctor had gone away.  Nobody else dared to go there.  It was about
+midnight that I left her for a minute to run home and get some medicine
+I had been takin', for I begun to feel rather bad.
+
+"It was a full moon that night, and just as I started out of my door to
+cross the street back to Luella's, I stopped short, for I saw
+something."
+
+Lydia Anderson at this juncture always said with a certain defiance
+that she did not expect to be believed, and then proceeded in a hushed
+voice:
+
+"I saw what I saw, and I know I saw it, and I will swear on my death
+bed that I saw it.  I saw Luella Miller and Erastus Miller, and Lily,
+and Aunt Abby, and Maria, and the Doctor, and Sarah, all goin' out of
+her door, and all but Luella shone white in the moonlight, and they
+were all helpin' her along till she seemed to fairly fly in the midst
+of them.  Then it all disappeared.  I stood a minute with my heart
+poundin', then I went over there.  I thought of goin' for Mrs. Babbit,
+but I thought she'd be afraid.  So I went alone, though I knew what had
+happened.  Luella was layin' real peaceful, dead on her bed."
+
+This was the story that the old woman, Lydia Anderson, told, but the
+sequel was told by the people who survived her, and this is the tale
+which has become folklore in the village.
+
+Lydia Anderson died when she was eighty-seven.  She had continued
+wonderfully hale and hearty for one of her years until about two weeks
+before her death.
+
+One bright moonlight evening she was sitting beside a window in her
+parlour when she made a sudden exclamation, and was out of the house
+and across the street before the neighbour who was taking care of her
+could stop her.  She followed as fast as possible and found Lydia
+Anderson stretched on the ground before the door of Luella Miller's
+deserted house, and she was quite dead.
+
+The next night there was a red gleam of fire athwart the moonlight and
+the old house of Luella Miller was burned to the ground. Nothing is now
+left of it except a few old cellar stones and a lilac bush, and in
+summer a helpless trail of morning glories among the weeds, which might
+be considered emblematic of Luella herself.
+
+
+
+
+THE SOUTHWEST CHAMBER
+
+
+"That school-teacher from Acton is coming to-day," said the elder Miss
+Gill, Sophia.
+
+"So she is," assented the younger Miss Gill, Amanda.
+
+"I have decided to put her in the southwest chamber," said Sophia.
+
+Amanda looked at her sister with an expression of mingled doubt and
+terror.  "You don't suppose she would--" she began hesitatingly.
+
+"Would what?" demanded Sophia, sharply.  She was more incisive than her
+sister.  Both were below the medium height, and stout, but Sophia was
+firm where Amanda was flabby.  Amanda wore a baggy old muslin (it was a
+hot day), and Sophia was uncompromisingly hooked up in a starched and
+boned cambric over her high shelving figure.
+
+"I didn't know but she would object to sleeping in that room, as long
+as Aunt Harriet died there such a little time ago," faltered Amanda.
+
+"Well!" said Sophia, "of all the silly notions!  If you are going to
+pick out rooms in this house where nobody has died, for the boarders,
+you'll have your hands full.  Grandfather Ackley had seven children;
+four of them died here to my certain knowledge, besides grandfather and
+grandmother.  I think Great-grandmother Ackley, grandfather's mother,
+died here, too; she must have; and Great-grandfather Ackley, and
+grandfather's unmarried sister, Great-aunt Fanny Ackley.  I don't
+believe there's a room nor a bed in this house that somebody hasn't
+passed away in."
+
+"Well, I suppose I am silly to think of it, and she had better go in
+there," said Amanda.
+
+"I know she had.  The northeast room is small and hot, and she's stout
+and likely to feel the heat, and she's saved money and is able to board
+out summers, and maybe she'll come here another year if she's well
+accommodated," said Sophia.  "Now I guess you'd better go in there and
+see if any dust has settled on anything since it was cleaned, and open
+the west windows and let the sun in, while I see to that cake."
+
+Amanda went to her task in the southwest chamber while her sister
+stepped heavily down the back stairs on her way to the kitchen.
+
+"It seems to me you had better open the bed while you air and dust,
+then make it up again," she called back.
+
+"Yes, sister," Amanda answered, shudderingly.
+
+Nobody knew how this elderly woman with the untrammeled imagination of
+a child dreaded to enter the southwest chamber, and yet she could not
+have told why she had the dread.  She had entered and occupied rooms
+which had been once tenanted by persons now dead. The room which had
+been hers in the little house in which she and her sister had lived
+before coming here had been her dead mother's. She had never reflected
+upon the fact with anything but loving awe and reverence.  There had
+never been any fear.  But this was different.  She entered and her
+heart beat thickly in her ears. Her hands were cold.  The room was a
+very large one.  The four windows, two facing south, two west, were
+closed, the blinds also. The room was in a film of green gloom.  The
+furniture loomed out vaguely.  The gilt frame of a blurred old
+engraving on the wall caught a little light.  The white counterpane on
+the bed showed like a blank page.
+
+Amanda crossed the room, opened with a straining motion of her thin
+back and shoulders one of the west windows, and threw back the blind.
+Then the room revealed itself an apartment full of an aged and worn but
+no less valid state.  Pieces of old mahogany swelled forth; a
+peacock-patterned chintz draped the bedstead.  This chintz also covered
+a great easy chair which had been the favourite seat of the former
+occupant of the room.  The closet door stood ajar. Amanda noticed that
+with wonder.  There was a glimpse of purple drapery floating from a peg
+inside the closet.  Amanda went across and took down the garment
+hanging there.  She wondered how her sister had happened to leave it
+when she cleaned the room.  It was an old loose gown which had belonged
+to her aunt.  She took it down, shuddering, and closed the closet door
+after a fearful glance into its dark depths.  It was a long closet with
+a strong odour of lovage.  The Aunt Harriet had had a habit of eating
+lovage and had carried it constantly in her pocket.  There was very
+likely some of the pleasant root in the pocket of the musty purple gown
+which Amanda threw over the easy chair.
+
+Amanda perceived the odour with a start as if before an actual
+presence.  Odour seems in a sense a vital part of a personality. It can
+survive the flesh to which it has clung like a persistent shadow,
+seeming to have in itself something of the substance of that to which
+it pertained.  Amanda was always conscious of this fragrance of lovage
+as she tidied the room.  She dusted the heavy mahogany pieces
+punctiliously after she had opened the bed as her sister had directed.
+She spread fresh towels over the wash-stand and the bureau; she made
+the bed.  Then she thought to take the purple gown from the easy chair
+and carry it to the garret and put it in the trunk with the other
+articles of the dead woman's wardrobe which had been packed away there;
+BUT THE PURPLE GOWN WAS NOT ON THE CHAIR!
+
+Amanda Gill was not a woman of strong convictions even as to her own
+actions.  She directly thought that possibly she had been mistaken and
+had not removed it from the closet.  She glanced at the closet door and
+saw with surprise that it was open, and she had thought she had closed
+it, but she instantly was not sure of that. So she entered the closet
+and looked for the purple gown.  IT WAS NOT THERE!
+
+Amanda Gill went feebly out of the closet and looked at the easy chair
+again.  The purple gown was not there!  She looked wildly around the
+room.  She went down on her trembling knees and peered under the bed,
+she opened the bureau drawers, she looked again in the closet.  Then
+she stood in the middle of the floor and fairly wrung her hands.
+
+"What does it mean?" she said in a shocked whisper.
+
+She had certainly seen that loose purple gown of her dead Aunt
+Harriet's.
+
+There is a limit at which self-refutation must stop in any sane person.
+Amanda Gill had reached it.  She knew that she had seen that purple
+gown in that closet; she knew that she had removed it and put it on the
+easy chair.  She also knew that she had not taken it out of the room.
+She felt a curious sense of being inverted mentally.  It was as if all
+her traditions and laws of life were on their heads.  Never in her
+simple record had any garment not remained where she had placed it
+unless removed by some palpable human agency.
+
+Then the thought occurred to her that possibly her sister Sophia might
+have entered the room unobserved while her back was turned and removed
+the dress.  A sensation of relief came over her.  Her blood seemed to
+flow back into its usual channels; the tension of her nerves relaxed.
+
+"How silly I am," she said aloud.
+
+She hurried out and downstairs into the kitchen where Sophia was making
+cake, stirring with splendid circular sweeps of a wooden spoon a creamy
+yellow mass.  She looked up as her sister entered.
+
+"Have you got it done?" said she.
+
+"Yes," replied Amanda.  Then she hesitated.  A sudden terror overcame
+her.  It did not seem as if it were at all probable that Sophia had
+left that foamy cake mixture a second to go to Aunt Harriet's chamber
+and remove that purple gown.
+
+"Well," said Sophia, "if you have got that done I wish you would take
+hold and string those beans.  The first thing we know there won't be
+time to boil them for dinner."
+
+Amanda moved toward the pan of beans on the table, then she looked at
+her sister.
+
+"Did you come up in Aunt Harriet's room while I was there?" she asked
+weakly.
+
+She knew while she asked what the answer would be.
+
+"Up in Aunt Harriet's room?  Of course I didn't.  I couldn't leave this
+cake without having it fall.  You know that well enough. Why?"
+
+"Nothing," replied Amanda.
+
+Suddenly she realized that she could not tell her sister what had
+happened, for before the utter absurdity of the whole thing her belief
+in her own reason quailed.  She knew what Sophia would say if she told
+her.  She could hear her.
+
+"Amanda Gill, have you gone stark staring mad?"
+
+She resolved that she would never tell Sophia.  She dropped into a
+chair and begun shelling the beans with nerveless fingers.  Sophia
+looked at her curiously.
+
+"Amanda Gill, what on earth ails you?" she asked.
+
+"Nothing," replied Amanda.  She bent her head very low over the green
+pods.
+
+"Yes, there is, too!  You are as white as a sheet, and your hands are
+shaking so you can hardly string those beans.  I did think you had more
+sense, Amanda Gill."
+
+"I don't know what you mean, Sophia."
+
+"Yes, you do know what I mean, too; you needn't pretend you don't. Why
+did you ask me if I had been in that room, and why do you act so queer?"
+
+Amanda hesitated.  She had been trained to truth.  Then she lied.
+
+"I wondered if you'd noticed how it had leaked in on the paper over by
+the bureau, that last rain," said she.
+
+"What makes you look so pale then?"
+
+"I don't know.  I guess the heat sort of overcame me."
+
+"I shouldn't think it could have been very hot in that room when it had
+been shut up so long," said Sophia.
+
+She was evidently not satisfied, but then the grocer came to the door
+and the matter dropped.
+
+For the next hour the two women were very busy.  They kept no servant.
+When they had come into possession of this fine old place by the death
+of their aunt it had seemed a doubtful blessing. There was not a cent
+with which to pay for repairs and taxes and insurance, except the
+twelve hundred dollars which they had obtained from the sale of the
+little house in which they had been born and lived all their lives.
+There had been a division in the old Ackley family years before.  One
+of the daughters had married against her mother's wish and had been
+disinherited.  She had married a poor man by the name of Gill, and
+shared his humble lot in sight of her former home and her sister and
+mother living in prosperity, until she had borne three daughters; then
+she died, worn out with overwork and worry.
+
+The mother and the elder sister had been pitiless to the last. Neither
+had ever spoken to her since she left her home the night of her
+marriage.  They were hard women.
+
+The three daughters of the disinherited sister had lived quiet and
+poor, but not actually needy lives.  Jane, the middle daughter, had
+married, and died in less than a year.  Amanda and Sophia had taken the
+girl baby she left when the father married again.  Sophia had taught a
+primary school for many years; she had saved enough to buy the little
+house in which they lived.  Amanda had crocheted lace, and embroidered
+flannel, and made tidies and pincushions, and had earned enough for her
+clothes and the child's, little Flora Scott.
+
+Their father, William Gill, had died before they were thirty, and now
+in their late middle life had come the death of the aunt to whom they
+had never spoken, although they had often seen her, who had lived in
+solitary state in the old Ackley mansion until she was more than
+eighty.  There had been no will, and they were the only heirs with the
+exception of young Flora Scott, the daughter of the dead sister.
+
+Sophia and Amanda thought directly of Flora when they knew of the
+inheritance.
+
+"It will be a splendid thing for her; she will have enough to live on
+when we are gone," Sophia said.
+
+She had promptly decided what was to be done.  The small house was to
+be sold, and they were to move into the old Ackley house and take
+boarders to pay for its keeping.  She scouted the idea of selling it.
+She had an enormous family pride.  She had always held her head high
+when she had walked past that fine old mansion, the cradle of her race,
+which she was forbidden to enter.  She was unmoved when the lawyer who
+was advising her disclosed to her the fact that Harriet Ackley had used
+every cent of the Ackley money.
+
+"I realize that we have to work," said she, "but my sister and I have
+determined to keep the place."
+
+That was the end of the discussion.  Sophia and Amanda Gill had been
+living in the old Ackley house a fortnight, and they had three
+boarders: an elderly widow with a comfortable income, a young
+congregationalist clergyman, and the middle-aged single woman who had
+charge of the village library.  Now the school-teacher from Acton, Miss
+Louisa Stark, was expected for the summer, and would make four.
+
+Sophia considered that they were comfortably provided for.  Her wants
+and her sister's were very few, and even the niece, although a young
+girl, had small expenses, since her wardrobe was supplied for years to
+come from that of the deceased aunt.  There were stored away in the
+garret of the Ackley house enough voluminous black silks and satins and
+bombazines to keep her clad in somber richness for years to come.
+
+Flora was a very gentle girl, with large, serious blue eyes, a
+seldom-smiling, pretty mouth, and smooth flaxen hair.  She was delicate
+and very young--sixteen on her next birthday.
+
+She came home soon now with her parcels of sugar and tea from the
+grocer's.  She entered the kitchen gravely and deposited them on the
+table by which her Aunt Amanda was seated stringing beans. Flora wore
+an obsolete turban-shaped hat of black straw which had belonged to the
+dead aunt; it set high like a crown, revealing her forehead.  Her dress
+was an ancient purple-and-white print, too long and too large except
+over the chest, where it held her like a straight waistcoat.
+
+"You had better take off your hat, Flora," said Sophia.  She turned
+suddenly to Amanda.  "Did you fill the water-pitcher in that chamber
+for the schoolteacher?" she asked severely.  She was quite sure that
+Amanda had not filled the water-pitcher.
+
+Amanda blushed and started guiltily.  "I declare, I don't believe I
+did," said she.
+
+"I didn't think you had," said her sister with sarcastic emphasis.
+
+"Flora, you go up to the room that was your Great-aunt Harriet's, and
+take the water-pitcher off the wash-stand and fill it with water.  Be
+real careful, and don't break the pitcher, and don't spill the water."
+
+"In THAT chamber?" asked Flora.  She spoke very quietly, but her face
+changed a little.
+
+"Yes, in that chamber," returned her Aunt Sophia sharply.  "Go right
+along."
+
+Flora went, and her light footstep was heard on the stairs.  Very soon
+she returned with the blue-and-white water-pitcher and filled it
+carefully at the kitchen sink.
+
+"Now be careful and not spill it," said Sophia as she went out of the
+room carrying it gingerly.
+
+Amanda gave a timidly curious glance at her; she wondered if she had
+seen the purple gown.
+
+Then she started, for the village stagecoach was seen driving around to
+the front of the house.  The house stood on a corner.
+
+"Here, Amanda, you look better than I do; you go and meet her," said
+Sophia.  "I'll just put the cake in the pan and get it in the oven and
+I'll come.  Show her right up to her room."
+
+Amanda removed her apron hastily and obeyed.  Sophia hurried with her
+cake, pouring it into the baking-tins.  She had just put it in the
+oven, when the door opened and Flora entered carrying the blue
+water-pitcher.
+
+"What are you bringing down that pitcher again for?" asked Sophia.
+
+"She wants some water, and Aunt Amanda sent me," replied Flora.
+
+Her pretty pale face had a bewildered expression.
+
+"For the land sake, she hasn't used all that great pitcherful of water
+so quick?"
+
+"There wasn't any water in it," replied Flora.
+
+Her high, childish forehead was contracted slightly with a puzzled
+frown as she looked at her aunt.
+
+"Wasn't any water in it?"
+
+"No, ma'am."
+
+"Didn't I see you filling the pitcher with water not ten minutes ago, I
+want to know?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am."
+
+"What did you do with that water?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Did you carry that pitcherful of water up to that room and set it on
+the washstand?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am."
+
+"Didn't you spill it?"
+
+"No, ma'am."
+
+"Now, Flora Scott, I want the truth!  Did you fill that pitcher with
+water and carry it up there, and wasn't there any there when she came
+to use it?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am."
+
+"Let me see that pitcher."  Sophia examined the pitcher.  It was not
+only perfectly dry from top to bottom, but even a little dusty. She
+turned severely on the young girl.  "That shows," said she, "you did
+not fill the pitcher at all.  You let the water run at the side because
+you didn't want to carry it upstairs.  I am ashamed of you.  It's bad
+enough to be so lazy, but when it comes to not telling the truth--"
+
+The young girl's face broke up suddenly into piteous confusion, and her
+blue eyes became filmy with tears.
+
+"I did fill the pitcher, honest," she faltered, "I did, Aunt Sophia.
+You ask Aunt Amanda."
+
+"I'll ask nobody.  This pitcher is proof enough.  Water don't go off
+and leave the pitcher dusty on the inside if it was put in ten minutes
+ago.  Now you fill that pitcher full quick, and you carry it upstairs,
+and if you spill a drop there'll be something besides talk."
+
+Flora filled the pitcher, with the tears falling over her cheeks. She
+sniveled softly as she went out, balancing it carefully against her
+slender hip.  Sophia followed her.
+
+"Stop crying," said she sharply; "you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
+What do you suppose Miss Louisa Stark will think.  No water in her
+pitcher in the first place, and then you come back crying as if you
+didn't want to get it."
+
+In spite of herself, Sophia's voice was soothing.  She was very fond of
+the girl.  She followed her up the stairs to the chamber where Miss
+Louisa Stark was waiting for the water to remove the soil of travel.
+She had removed her bonnet, and its tuft of red geraniums lightened the
+obscurity of the mahogany dresser.  She had placed her little beaded
+cape carefully on the bed.  She was replying to a tremulous remark of
+Amanda's, who was nearly fainting from the new mystery of the
+water-pitcher, that it was warm and she suffered a good deal in warm
+weather.
+
+Louisa Stark was stout and solidly built.  She was much larger than
+either of the Gill sisters.  She was a masterly woman inured to command
+from years of school-teaching.  She carried her swelling bulk with
+majesty; even her face, moist and red with the heat, lost nothing of
+its dignity of expression.
+
+She was standing in the middle of the floor with an air which gave the
+effect of her standing upon an elevation.  She turned when Sophia and
+Flora, carrying the water-pitcher, entered.
+
+"This is my sister Sophia," said Amanda tremulously.
+
+Sophia advanced, shook hands with Miss Louisa Stark and bade her
+welcome and hoped she would like her room.  Then she moved toward the
+closet.  "There is a nice large closet in this room--the best closet in
+the house.  You might have your trunk--" she said, then she stopped
+short.
+
+The closet door was ajar, and a purple garment seemed suddenly to swing
+into view as if impelled by some wind.
+
+"Why, here is something left in this closet," Sophia said in a
+mortified tone.  "I thought all those things had been taken away."
+
+She pulled down the garment with a jerk, and as she did so Amanda
+passed her in a weak rush for the door.
+
+"I am afraid your sister is not well," said the school-teacher from
+Acton.  "She looked very pale when you took that dress down.  I noticed
+it at once.  Hadn't you better go and see what the matter is?  She may
+be going to faint."
+
+"She is not subject to fainting spells," replied Sophia, but she
+followed Amanda.
+
+She found her in the room which they occupied together, lying on the
+bed, very pale and gasping.  She leaned over her.
+
+"Amanda, what is the matter; don't you feel well?" she asked.
+
+"I feel a little faint."
+
+Sophia got a camphor bottle and began rubbing her sister's forehead.
+
+"Do you feel better?" she said.
+
+Amanda nodded.
+
+"I guess it was that green apple pie you ate this noon," said Sophia.
+"I declare, what did I do with that dress of Aunt Harriet's?  I guess
+if you feel better I'll just run and get it and take it up garret.
+I'll stop in here again when I come down. You'd better lay still.
+Flora can bring you up a cup of tea.  I wouldn't try to eat any supper."
+
+Sophia's tone as she left the room was full of loving concern.
+Presently she returned; she looked disturbed, but angrily so. There was
+not the slightest hint of any fear in her expression.
+
+"I want to know," said she, looking sharply and quickly around, "if I
+brought that purple dress in here, after all?"
+
+"I didn't see you," replied Amanda.
+
+"I must have.  It isn't in that chamber, nor the closet.  You aren't
+lying on it, are you?"
+
+"I lay down before you came in," replied Amanda.
+
+"So you did.  Well, I'll go and look again."
+
+Presently Amanda heard her sister's heavy step on the garret stairs.
+Then she returned with a queer defiant expression on her face.
+
+"I carried it up garret, after all, and put it in the trunk," said,
+she.  "I declare, I forgot it.  I suppose your being faint sort of put
+it out of my head.  There it was, folded up just as nice, right where I
+put it."
+
+Sophia's mouth was set; her eyes upon her sister's scared, agitated
+face were full of hard challenge.
+
+"Yes," murmured Amanda.
+
+"I must go right down and see to that cake," said Sophia, going out of
+the room.  "If you don't feel well, you pound on the floor with the
+umbrella."
+
+Amanda looked after her.  She knew that Sophia had not put that purple
+dress of her dead Aunt Harriet in the trunk in the garret.
+
+Meantime Miss Louisa Stark was settling herself in the southwest
+chamber.  She unpacked her trunk and hung her dresses carefully in the
+closet.  She filled the bureau drawers with nicely folded linen and
+small articles of dress.  She was a very punctilious woman.  She put on
+a black India silk dress with purple flowers. She combed her
+grayish-blond hair in smooth ridges back from her broad forehead.  She
+pinned her lace at her throat with a brooch, very handsome, although
+somewhat obsolete--a bunch of pearl grapes on black onyx, set in gold
+filagree.  She had purchased it several years ago with a considerable
+portion of the stipend from her spring term of school-teaching.
+
+As she surveyed herself in the little swing mirror surmounting the
+old-fashioned mahogany bureau she suddenly bent forward and looked
+closely at the brooch.  It seemed to her that something was wrong with
+it.  As she looked she became sure.  Instead of the familiar bunch of
+pearl grapes on the black onyx, she saw a knot of blonde and black hair
+under glass surrounded by a border of twisted gold. She felt a thrill
+of horror, though she could not tell why.  She unpinned the brooch, and
+it was her own familiar one, the pearl grapes and the onyx.  "How very
+foolish I am," she thought.  She thrust the pin in the laces at her
+throat and again looked at herself in the glass, and there it was
+again--the knot of blond and black hair and the twisted gold.
+
+Louisa Stark looked at her own large, firm face above the brooch and it
+was full of terror and dismay which were new to it.  She straightway
+began to wonder if there could be anything wrong with her mind.  She
+remembered that an aunt of her mother's had been insane.  A sort of
+fury with herself possessed her.  She stared at the brooch in the glass
+with eyes at once angry and terrified. Then she removed it again and
+there was her own old brooch. Finally she thrust the gold pin through
+the lace again, fastened it and turning a defiant back on the glass,
+went down to supper.
+
+At the supper table she met the other boarders--the elderly widow, the
+young clergyman and the middle-aged librarian.  She viewed the elderly
+widow with reserve, the clergyman with respect, the middle-aged
+librarian with suspicion.  The latter wore a very youthful shirt-waist,
+and her hair in a girlish fashion which the school-teacher, who twisted
+hers severely from the straining roots at the nape of her neck to the
+small, smooth coil at the top, condemned as straining after effects no
+longer hers by right.
+
+The librarian, who had a quick acridness of manner, addressed her,
+asking what room she had, and asked the second time in spite of the
+school-teacher's evident reluctance to hear her.  She even, since she
+sat next to her, nudged her familiarly in her rigid black silk side.
+
+"What room are you in, Miss Stark?" said she.
+
+"I am at a loss how to designate the room," replied Miss Stark stiffly.
+
+"Is it the big southwest room?"
+
+"It evidently faces in that direction," said Miss Stark.
+
+The librarian, whose name was Eliza Lippincott, turned abruptly to Miss
+Amanda Gill, over whose delicate face a curious colour compounded of
+flush and pallour was stealing.
+
+"What room did your aunt die in, Miss Amanda?" asked she abruptly.
+
+Amanda cast a terrified glance at her sister, who was serving a second
+plate of pudding for the minister.
+
+"That room," she replied feebly.
+
+"That's what I thought," said the librarian with a certain triumph. "I
+calculated that must be the room she died in, for it's the best room in
+the house, and you haven't put anybody in it before. Somehow the room
+that anybody has died in lately is generally the last room that anybody
+is put in.  I suppose YOU are so strong-minded you don't object to
+sleeping in a room where anybody died a few weeks ago?" she inquired of
+Louisa Stark with sharp eyes on her face.
+
+"No, I do not," replied Miss stark with emphasis.
+
+"Nor in the same bed?" persisted Eliza Lippincott with a kittenish
+reflection.
+
+The young minister looked up from his pudding.  He was very spiritual,
+but he had had poor pickings in his previous boarding place, and he
+could not help a certain abstract enjoyment over Miss Gill's cooking.
+
+"You would certainly not be afraid, Miss Lippincott?" he remarked, with
+his gentle, almost caressing inflection of tone.  "You do not for a
+minute believe that a higher power would allow any manifestation on the
+part of a disembodied spirit--who we trust is in her heavenly home--to
+harm one of His servants?"
+
+"Oh, Mr. Dunn, of course not," replied Eliza Lippincott with a blush.
+"Of course not.  I never meant to imply--"
+
+"I could not believe you did," said the minister gently.  He was very
+young, but he already had a wrinkle of permanent anxiety between his
+eyes and a smile of permanent ingratiation on his lips. The lines of
+the smile were as deeply marked as the wrinkle.
+
+"Of course dear Miss Harriet Gill was a professing Christian," remarked
+the widow, "and I don't suppose a professing Christian would come back
+and scare folks if she could.  I wouldn't be a mite afraid to sleep in
+that room; I'd rather have it than the one I've got.  If I was afraid
+to sleep in a room where a good woman died, I wouldn't tell of it.  If
+I saw things or heard things I'd think the fault must be with my own
+guilty conscience."  Then she turned to Miss Stark.  "Any time you feel
+timid in that room I'm ready and willing to change with you," said she.
+
+"Thank you; I have no desire to change.  I am perfectly satisfied with
+my room," replied Miss Stark with freezing dignity, which was thrown
+away upon the widow.
+
+"Well," said she, "any time, if you should feel timid, you know what to
+do.  I've got a real nice room; it faces east and gets the morning sun,
+but it isn't so nice as yours, according to my way of thinking.  I'd
+rather take my chances any day in a room anybody had died in than in
+one that was hot in summer.  I'm more afraid of a sunstroke than of
+spooks, for my part."
+
+Miss Sophia Gill, who had not spoken one word, but whose mouth had
+become more and more rigidly compressed, suddenly rose from the table,
+forcing the minister to leave a little pudding, at which he glanced
+regretfully.
+
+Miss Louisa Stark did not sit down in the parlour with the other
+boarders.  She went straight to her room.  She felt tired after her
+journey, and meditated a loose wrapper and writing a few letters
+quietly before she went to bed.  Then, too, she was conscious of a
+feeling that if she delayed, the going there at all might assume more
+terrifying proportions.  She was full of defiance against herself and
+her own lurking weakness.
+
+So she went resolutely and entered the southwest chamber.  There was
+through the room a soft twilight.  She could dimly discern everything,
+the white satin scroll-work on the wall paper and the white counterpane
+on the bed being most evident.  Consequently both arrested her
+attention first.  She saw against the wall-paper directly facing the
+door the waist of her best black satin dress hung over a picture.
+
+"That is very strange," she said to herself, and again a thrill of
+vague horror came over her.
+
+She knew, or thought she knew, that she had put that black satin dress
+waist away nicely folded between towels in her trunk.  She was very
+choice of her black satin dress.
+
+She took down the black waist and laid it on the bed preparatory to
+folding it, but when she attempted to do so she discovered that the two
+sleeves were firmly sewed together.  Louisa Stark stared at the sewed
+sleeves.  "What does this mean?" she asked herself.  She examined the
+sewing carefully; the stitches were small, and even, and firm, of black
+silk.
+
+She looked around the room.  On the stand beside the bed was something
+which she had not noticed before: a little old-fashioned work-box with
+a picture of a little boy in a pinafore on the top. Beside this
+work-box lay, as if just laid down by the user, a spool of black silk,
+a pair of scissors, and a large steel thimble with a hole in the top,
+after an old style.  Louisa stared at these, then at the sleeves of her
+dress.  She moved toward the door.  For a moment she thought that this
+was something legitimate about which she might demand information; then
+she became doubtful.  Suppose that work-box had been there all the
+time; suppose she had forgotten; suppose she herself had done this
+absurd thing, or suppose that she had not, what was to hinder the
+others from thinking so; what was to hinder a doubt being cast upon her
+own memory and reasoning powers?
+
+Louisa Stark had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown in spite of
+her iron constitution and her great will power.  No woman can teach
+school for forty years with absolute impunity.  She was more credulous
+as to her own possible failings than she had ever been in her whole
+life.  She was cold with horror and terror, and yet not so much horror
+and terror of the supernatural as of her own self. The weakness of
+belief in the supernatural was nearly impossible for this strong
+nature.  She could more easily believe in her own failing powers.
+
+"I don't know but I'm going to be like Aunt Marcia," she said to
+herself, and her fat face took on a long rigidity of fear.
+
+She started toward the mirror to unfasten her dress, then she
+remembered the strange circumstance of the brooch and stopped short.
+Then she straightened herself defiantly and marched up to the bureau
+and looked in the glass.  She saw reflected therein, fastening the lace
+at her throat, the old-fashioned thing of a large oval, a knot of fair
+and black hair under glass, set in a rim of twisted gold.  She
+unfastened it with trembling fingers and looked at it.  It was her own
+brooch, the cluster of pearl grapes on black onyx.  Louisa Stark placed
+the trinket in its little box on the nest of pink cotton and put it
+away in the bureau drawer. Only death could disturb her habit of order.
+
+Her fingers were so cold they felt fairly numb as she unfastened her
+dress; she staggered when she slipped it over her head.  She went to
+the closet to hang it up and recoiled.  A strong smell of lovage came
+in her nostrils; a purple gown near the door swung softly against her
+face as if impelled by some wind from within. All the pegs were filled
+with garments not her own, mostly of somber black, but there were some
+strange-patterned silk things and satins.
+
+Suddenly Louisa Stark recovered her nerve.  This, she told herself, was
+something distinctly tangible.  Somebody had been taking liberties with
+her wardrobe.  Somebody had been hanging some one else's clothes in her
+closet.  She hastily slipped on her dress again and marched straight
+down to the parlour.  The people were seated there; the widow and the
+minister were playing backgammon. The librarian was watching them.
+Miss Amanda Gill was mending beside the large lamp on the centre table.
+They all looked up with amazement as Louisa Stark entered.  There was
+something strange in her expression.  She noticed none of them except
+Amanda.
+
+"Where is your sister?" she asked peremptorily of her.
+
+"She's in the kitchen mixing up bread," Amanda quavered; "is there
+anything--"  But the school-teacher was gone.
+
+She found Sophia Gill standing by the kitchen table kneading dough with
+dignity.  The young girl Flora was bringing some flour from the pantry.
+She stopped and stared at Miss Stark, and her pretty, delicate young
+face took on an expression of alarm.
+
+Miss Stark opened at once upon the subject in her mind.
+
+"Miss Gill," said she, with her utmost school-teacher manner, "I wish
+to inquire why you have had my own clothes removed from the closet in
+my room and others substituted?"
+
+Sophia Gill stood with her hands fast in the dough, regarding her. Her
+own face paled slowly and reluctantly, her mouth stiffened.
+
+"What?  I don't quite understand what you mean, Miss Stark," said she.
+
+"My clothes are not in the closet in my room and it is full of things
+which do not belong to me," said Louisa Stark.
+
+"Bring me that flour," said Sophia sharply to the young girl, who
+obeyed, casting timid, startled glances at Miss Stark as she passed
+her.  Sophia Gill began rubbing her hands clear of the dough.  "I am
+sure I know nothing about it," she said with a certain tempered
+asperity.  "Do you know anything about it, Flora?"
+
+"Oh, no, I don't know anything about it, Aunt Sophia," answered the
+young girl, fluttering.
+
+Then Sophia turned to Miss Stark.  "I'll go upstairs with you, Miss
+Stark," said she, "and see what the trouble is.  There must be some
+mistake."  She spoke stiffly with constrained civility.
+
+"Very well," said Miss Stark with dignity.  Then she and Miss Sophia
+went upstairs.  Flora stood staring after them.
+
+Sophia and Louisa Stark went up to the southwest chamber.  The closet
+door was shut.  Sophia threw it open, then she looked at Miss Stark.
+On the pegs hung the schoolteacher's own garments in ordinary array.
+
+"I can't see that there is anything wrong," remarked Sophia grimly.
+
+Miss Stark strove to speak but she could not.  She sank down on the
+nearest chair.  She did not even attempt to defend herself.  She saw
+her own clothes in the closet.  She knew there had been no time for any
+human being to remove those which she thought she had seen and put hers
+in their places.  She knew it was impossible.  Again the awful horror
+of herself overwhelmed her.
+
+"You must have been mistaken," she heard Sophia say.
+
+She muttered something, she scarcely knew what.  Sophia then went out
+of the room.  Presently she undressed and went to bed.  In the morning
+she did not go down to breakfast, and when Sophia came to inquire,
+requested that the stage be ordered for the noon train. She said that
+she was sorry, but was ill, and feared lest she might be worse, and she
+felt that she must return home at once.  She looked ill, and could not
+take even the toast and tea which Sophia had prepared for her.  Sophia
+felt a certain pity for her, but it was largely mixed with indignation.
+She felt that she knew the true reason for the school-teacher's illness
+and sudden departure, and it incensed her.
+
+"If folks are going to act like fools we shall never be able to keep
+this house," she said to Amanda after Miss Stark had gone; and Amanda
+knew what she meant.
+
+Directly the widow, Mrs. Elvira Simmons, knew that the school-teacher
+had gone and the southwest room was vacant, she begged to have it in
+exchange for her own.  Sophia hesitated a moment; she eyed the widow
+sharply.  There was something about the large, roseate face worn in
+firm lines of humour and decision which reassured her.
+
+"I have no objection, Mrs. Simmons," said she, "if--"
+
+"If what?" asked the widow.
+
+"If you have common sense enough not to keep fussing because the room
+happens to be the one my aunt died in," said Sophia bluntly.
+
+"Fiddlesticks!" said the widow, Mrs. Elvira Simmons.
+
+That very afternoon she moved into the southwest chamber.  The young
+girl Flora assisted her, though much against her will.
+
+"Now I want you to carry Mrs. Simmons' dresses into the closet in that
+room and hang them up nicely, and see that she has everything she
+wants," said Sophia Gill.  "And you can change the bed and put on fresh
+sheets.  What are you looking at me that way for?"
+
+"Oh, Aunt Sophia, can't I do something else?"
+
+"What do you want to do something else for?"
+
+"I am afraid."
+
+"Afraid of what?  I should think you'd hang your head.  No; you go
+right in there and do what I tell you."
+
+Pretty soon Flora came running into the sitting-room where Sophia was,
+as pale as death, and in her hand she held a queer, old-fashioned
+frilled nightcap.
+
+"What's that?" demanded Sophia.
+
+"I found it under the pillow."
+
+"What pillow?"
+
+"In the southwest room."
+
+Sophia took it and looked at it sternly.
+
+"It's Great-aunt Harriet's," said Flora faintly.
+
+"You run down street and do that errand at the grocer's for me and I'll
+see that room," said Sophia with dignity.  She carried the nightcap
+away and put it in the trunk in the garret where she had supposed it
+stored with the rest of the dead woman's belongings. Then she went into
+the southwest chamber and made the bed and assisted Mrs. Simmons to
+move, and there was no further incident.
+
+The widow was openly triumphant over her new room.  She talked a deal
+about it at the dinner-table.
+
+"It is the best room in the house, and I expect you all to be envious
+of me," said she.
+
+"And you are sure you don't feel afraid of ghosts?" said the librarian.
+
+"Ghosts!" repeated the widow with scorn.  "If a ghost comes I'll send
+her over to you.  You are just across the hall from the southwest room."
+
+"You needn't," returned Eliza Lippincott with a shudder.  "I wouldn't
+sleep in that room, after--" she checked herself with an eye on the
+minister.
+
+"After what?" asked the widow.
+
+"Nothing," replied Eliza Lippincott in an embarrassed fashion.
+
+"I trust Miss Lippincott has too good sense and too great faith to
+believe in anything of that sort," said the minister.
+
+"I trust so, too," replied Eliza hurriedly.
+
+"You did see or hear something--now what was it, I want to know?" said
+the widow that evening when they were alone in the parlour. The
+minister had gone to make a call.
+
+Eliza hesitated.
+
+"What was it?" insisted the widow.
+
+"Well," said Eliza hesitatingly, "if you'll promise not to tell."
+
+"Yes, I promise; what was it?"
+
+"Well, one day last week, just before the school-teacher came, I went
+in that room to see if there were any clouds.  I wanted to wear my gray
+dress, and I was afraid it was going to rain, so I wanted to look at
+the sky at all points, so I went in there, and--"
+
+"And what?"
+
+"Well, you know that chintz over the bed, and the valance, and the easy
+chair; what pattern should you say it was?"
+
+"Why, peacocks on a blue ground.  Good land, I shouldn't think any one
+who had ever seen that would forget it."
+
+"Peacocks on a blue ground, you are sure?"
+
+"Of course I am.  Why?"
+
+"Only when I went in there that afternoon it was not peacocks on a blue
+ground; it was great red roses on a yellow ground."
+
+"Why, what do you mean?"
+
+"What I say."
+
+"Did Miss Sophia have it changed?"
+
+"No.  I went in there again an hour later and the peacocks were there."
+
+"You didn't see straight the first time."
+
+"I expected you would say that."
+
+"The peacocks are there now; I saw them just now."
+
+"Yes, I suppose so; I suppose they flew back."
+
+"But they couldn't."
+
+"Looks as if they did."
+
+"Why, how could such a thing be?  It couldn't be."
+
+"Well, all I know is those peacocks were gone for an hour that
+afternoon and the red roses on the yellow ground were there instead."
+
+The widow stared at her a moment, then she began to laugh rather
+hysterically.
+
+"Well," said she, "I guess I sha'n't give up my nice room for any such
+tomfoolery as that.  I guess I would just as soon have red roses on a
+yellow ground as peacocks on a blue; but there's no use talking, you
+couldn't have seen straight.  How could such a thing have happened?"
+
+"I don't know," said Eliza Lippincott; "but I know I wouldn't sleep in
+that room if you'd give me a thousand dollars."
+
+"Well, I would," said the widow, "and I'm going to."
+
+When Mrs. Simmons went to the southwest chamber that night she cast a
+glance at the bed-hanging and the easy chair.  There were the peacocks
+on the blue ground.  She gave a contemptuous thought to Eliza
+Lippincott.
+
+"I don't believe but she's getting nervous," she thought.  "I wonder if
+any of her family have been out at all."
+
+But just before Mrs. Simmons was ready to get into bed she looked again
+at the hangings and the easy chair, and there were the red roses on the
+yellow ground instead of the peacocks on the blue. She looked long and
+sharply.  Then she shut her eyes, and then opened them and looked.  She
+still saw the red roses.  Then she crossed the room, turned her back to
+the bed, and looked out at the night from the south window.  It was
+clear and the full moon was shining.  She watched it a moment sailing
+over the dark blue in its nimbus of gold.  Then she looked around at
+the bed hangings.  She still saw the red roses on the yellow ground.
+
+Mrs. Simmons was struck in her most vulnerable point.  This apparent
+contradiction of the reasonable as manifested in such a commonplace
+thing as chintz of a bed-hanging affected this ordinarily unimaginative
+woman as no ghostly appearance could have done. Those red roses on the
+yellow ground were to her much more ghostly than any strange figure
+clad in the white robes of the grave entering the room.
+
+She took a step toward the door, then she turned with a resolute air.
+"As for going downstairs and owning up I'm scared and having that
+Lippincott girl crowing over me, I won't for any red roses instead of
+peacocks.  I guess they can't hurt me, and as long as we've both of us
+seen 'em I guess we can't both be getting loony," she said.
+
+Mrs. Elvira Simmons blew out her light and got into bed and lay staring
+out between the chintz hangings at the moonlit room.  She said her
+prayers in bed always as being more comfortable, and presumably just as
+acceptable in the case of a faithful servant with a stout habit of
+body.  Then after a little she fell asleep; she was of too practical a
+nature to be kept long awake by anything which had no power of actual
+bodily effect upon her.  No stress of the spirit had ever disturbed her
+slumbers.  So she slumbered between the red roses, or the peacocks, she
+did not know which.
+
+But she was awakened about midnight by a strange sensation in her
+throat.  She had dreamed that some one with long white fingers was
+strangling her, and she saw bending over her the face of an old woman
+in a white cap.  When she waked there was no old woman, the room was
+almost as light as day in the full moonlight, and looked very peaceful;
+but the strangling sensation at her throat continued, and besides that,
+her face and ears felt muffled.  She put up her hand and felt that her
+head was covered with a ruffled nightcap tied under her chin so tightly
+that it was exceedingly uncomfortable.  A great qualm of horror shot
+over her.  She tore the thing off frantically and flung it from her
+with a convulsive effort as if it had been a spider.  She gave, as she
+did so, a quick, short scream of terror.  She sprang out of bed and was
+going toward the door, when she stopped.
+
+It had suddenly occurred to her that Eliza Lippincott might have
+entered the room and tied on the cap while she was asleep.  She had not
+locked her door.  She looked in the closet, under the bed; there was no
+one there.  Then she tried to open the door, but to her astonishment
+found that it was locked--bolted on the inside. "I must have locked it,
+after all," she reflected with wonder, for she never locked her door.
+Then she could scarcely conceal from herself that there was something
+out of the usual about it all. Certainly no one could have entered the
+room and departed locking the door on the inside.  She could not
+control the long shiver of horror that crept over her, but she was
+still resolute.  She resolved that she would throw the cap out of the
+window.  "I'll see if I have tricks like that played on me, I don't
+care who does it," said she quite aloud.  She was still unable to
+believe wholly in the supernatural.  The idea of some human agency was
+still in her mind, filling her with anger.
+
+She went toward the spot where she had thrown the cap--she had stepped
+over it on her way to the door--but it was not there.  She searched the
+whole room, lighting her lamp, but she could not find the cap.  Finally
+she gave it up.  She extinguished her lamp and went back to bed.  She
+fell asleep again, to be again awakened in the same fashion.  That time
+she tore off the cap as before, but she did not fling it on the floor
+as before.  Instead she held to it with a fierce grip.  Her blood was
+up.
+
+Holding fast to the white flimsy thing, she sprang out of bed, ran to
+the window which was open, slipped the screen, and flung it out; but a
+sudden gust of wind, though the night was calm, arose and it floated
+back in her face.  She brushed it aside like a cobweb and she clutched
+at it.  She was actually furious.  It eluded her clutching fingers.
+Then she did not see it at all.  She examined the floor, she lighted
+her lamp again and searched, but there was no sign of it.
+
+Mrs. Simmons was then in such a rage that all terror had disappeared
+for the time.  She did not know with what she was angry, but she had a
+sense of some mocking presence which was silently proving too strong
+against her weakness, and she was aroused to the utmost power of
+resistance.  To be baffled like this and resisted by something which
+was as nothing to her straining senses filled her with intensest
+resentment.
+
+Finally she got back into bed again; she did not go to sleep.  She felt
+strangely drowsy, but she fought against it.  She was wide awake,
+staring at the moonlight, when she suddenly felt the soft white strings
+of the thing tighten around her throat and realized that her enemy was
+again upon her.  She seized the strings, untied them, twitched off the
+cap, ran with it to the table where her scissors lay and furiously cut
+it into small bits.  She cut and tore, feeling an insane fury of
+gratification.
+
+"There!" said she quite aloud.  "I guess I sha'n't have any more
+trouble with this old cap."
+
+She tossed the bits of muslin into a basket and went back to bed.
+Almost immediately she felt the soft strings tighten around her throat.
+Then at last she yielded, vanquished.  This new refutal of all laws of
+reason by which she had learned, as it were, to spell her theory of
+life, was too much for her equilibrium.  She pulled off the clinging
+strings feebly, drew the thing from her head, slid weakly out of bed,
+caught up her wrapper and hastened out of the room.  She went
+noiselessly along the hall to her own old room: she entered, got into
+her familiar bed, and lay there the rest of the night shuddering and
+listening, and if she dozed, waking with a start at the feeling of the
+pressure upon her throat to find that it was not there, yet still to be
+unable to shake off entirely the horror.
+
+When daylight came she crept back to the southwest chamber and
+hurriedly got some clothes in which to dress herself.  It took all her
+resolution to enter the room, but nothing unusual happened while she
+was there.  She hastened back to her old chamber, dressed herself and
+went down to breakfast with an imperturbable face.  Her colour had not
+faded.  When asked by Eliza Lippincott how she had slept, she replied
+with an appearance of calmness which was bewildering that she had not
+slept very well.  She never did sleep very well in a new bed, and she
+thought she would go back to her old room.
+
+Eliza Lippincott was not deceived, however, neither were the Gill
+sisters, nor the young girl, Flora.  Eliza Lippincott spoke out bluntly.
+
+"You needn't talk to me about sleeping well," said she.  "I know
+something queer happened in that room last night by the way you act."
+
+They all looked at Mrs. Simmons, inquiringly--the librarian with
+malicious curiosity and triumph, the minister with sad incredulity,
+Sophia Gill with fear and indignation, Amanda and the young girl with
+unmixed terror.  The widow bore herself with dignity.
+
+"I saw nothing nor heard nothing which I trust could not have been
+accounted for in some rational manner," said she.
+
+"What was it?" persisted Eliza Lippincott.
+
+"I do not wish to discuss the matter any further," replied Mrs. Simmons
+shortly.  Then she passed her plate for more creamed potato.  She felt
+that she would die before she confessed to the ghastly absurdity of
+that nightcap, or to having been disturbed by the flight of peacocks
+off a blue field of chintz after she had scoffed at the possibility of
+such a thing.  She left the whole matter so vague that in a fashion she
+came off the mistress of the situation.  She at all events impressed
+everybody by her coolness in the face of no one knew what nightly
+terror.
+
+After breakfast, with the assistance of Amanda and Flora, she moved
+back into her old room.  Scarcely a word was spoken during the process
+of moving, but they all worked with trembling haste and looked guilty
+when they met one another's eyes, as if conscious of betraying a common
+fear.
+
+That afternoon the young minister, John Dunn, went to Sophia Gill and
+requested permission to occupy the southwest chamber that night.
+
+"I don't ask to have my effects moved there," said he, "for I could
+scarcely afford a room so much superior to the one I now occupy, but I
+would like, if you please, to sleep there to-night for the purpose of
+refuting in my own person any unfortunate superstition which may have
+obtained root here."
+
+Sophia Gill thanked the minister gratefully and eagerly accepted his
+offer.
+
+"How anybody with common sense can believe for a minute in any such
+nonsense passes my comprehension," said she.
+
+"It certainly passes mine how anybody with Christian faith can believe
+in ghosts," said the minister gently, and Sophia Gill felt a certain
+feminine contentment in hearing him.  The minister was a child to her;
+she regarded him with no tincture of sentiment, and yet she loved to
+hear two other women covertly condemned by him and she herself thereby
+exalted.
+
+That night about twelve o'clock the Reverend John Dunn essayed to go to
+his nightly slumber in the southwest chamber.  He had been sitting up
+until that hour preparing his sermon.
+
+He traversed the hall with a little night-lamp in his hand, opened the
+door of the southwest chamber, and essayed to enter.  He might as well
+have essayed to enter the solid side of a house.  He could not believe
+his senses.  The door was certainly open; he could look into the room
+full of soft lights and shadows under the moonlight which streamed into
+the windows.  He could see the bed in which he had expected to pass the
+night, but he could not enter.  Whenever he strove to do so he had a
+curious sensation as if he were trying to press against an invisible
+person who met him with a force of opposition impossible to overcome.
+The minister was not an athletic man, yet he had considerable strength.
+He squared his elbows, set his mouth hard, and strove to push his way
+through into the room.  The opposition which he met was as sternly and
+mutely terrible as the rocky fastness of a mountain in his way.
+
+For a half hour John Dunn, doubting, raging, overwhelmed with spiritual
+agony as to the state of his own soul rather than fear, strove to enter
+that southwest chamber.  He was simply powerless against this uncanny
+obstacle.  Finally a great horror as of evil itself came over him.  He
+was a nervous man and very young.  He fairly fled to his own chamber
+and locked himself in like a terror-stricken girl.
+
+The next morning he went to Miss Gill and told her frankly what had
+happened, and begged her to say nothing about it lest he should have
+injured the cause by the betrayal of such weakness, for he actually had
+come to believe that there was something wrong with the room.
+
+"What it is I know not, Miss Sophia," said he, "but I firmly believe,
+against my will, that there is in that room some accursed evil power at
+work, of which modern faith and modern science know nothing."
+
+Miss Sophia Gill listened with grimly lowering face.  She had an inborn
+respect for the clergy, but she was bound to hold that southwest
+chamber in the dearly beloved old house of her fathers free of blame.
+
+"I think I will sleep in that room myself to-night," she said, when the
+minister had finished.
+
+He looked at her in doubt and dismay.
+
+"I have great admiration for your faith and courage, Miss Sophia," he
+said, "but are you wise?"
+
+"I am fully resolved to sleep in that room to-night," said she
+conclusively.  There were occasions when Miss Sophia Gill could put on
+a manner of majesty, and she did now.
+
+It was ten o'clock that night when Sophia Gill entered the southwest
+chamber.  She had told her sister what she intended doing and had been
+proof against her tearful entreaties.  Amanda was charged not to tell
+the young girl, Flora.
+
+"There is no use in frightening that child over nothing," said Sophia.
+
+Sophia, when she entered the southwest chamber, set the lamp which she
+carried on the bureau, and began moving about the rooms pulling down
+the curtains, taking off the nice white counterpane of the bed, and
+preparing generally for the night.
+
+As she did so, moving with great coolness and deliberation, she became
+conscious that she was thinking some thoughts that were foreign to her.
+She began remembering what she could not have remembered, since she was
+not then born: the trouble over her mother's marriage, the bitter
+opposition, the shutting the door upon her, the ostracizing her from
+heart and home.  She became aware of a most singular sensation as of
+bitter resentment herself, and not against the mother and sister who
+had so treated her own mother, but against her own mother, and then she
+became aware of a like bitterness extended to her own self.  She felt
+malignant toward her mother as a young girl whom she remembered, though
+she could not have remembered, and she felt malignant toward her own
+self, and her sister Amanda, and Flora.  Evil suggestions surged in her
+brain--suggestions which turned her heart to stone and which still
+fascinated her.  And all the time by a sort of double consciousness she
+knew that what she thought was strange and not due to her own volition.
+She knew that she was thinking the thoughts of some other person, and
+she knew who.  She felt herself possessed.
+
+But there was tremendous strength in the woman's nature.  She had
+inherited strength for good and righteous self-assertion, from the evil
+strength of her ancestors.  They had turned their own weapons against
+themselves.  She made an effort which seemed almost mortal, but was
+conscious that the hideous thing was gone from her.  She thought her
+own thoughts.  Then she scouted to herself the idea of anything
+supernatural about the terrific experience.  "I am imagining
+everything," she told herself.  She went on with her preparations; she
+went to the bureau to take down her hair.  She looked in the glass and
+saw, instead of her softly parted waves of hair, harsh lines of
+iron-gray under the black borders of an old-fashioned head-dress.  She
+saw instead of her smooth, broad forehead, a high one wrinkled with the
+intensest concentration of selfish reflections of a long life; she saw
+instead of her steady blue eyes, black ones with depths of malignant
+reserve, behind a broad meaning of ill will; she saw instead of her
+firm, benevolent mouth one with a hard, thin line, a network of
+melancholic wrinkles.  She saw instead of her own face, middle-aged and
+good to see, the expression of a life of honesty and good will to
+others and patience under trials, the face of a very old woman scowling
+forever with unceasing hatred and misery at herself and all others, at
+life, and death, at that which had been and that which was to come.
+She saw instead of her own face in the glass, the face of her dead Aunt
+Harriet, topping her own shoulders in her own well-known dress!
+
+Sophia Gill left the room.  She went into the one which she shared with
+her sister Amanda.  Amanda looked up and saw her standing there.  She
+had set the lamp on a table, and she stood holding a handkerchief over
+her face.  Amanda looked at her with terror.
+
+"What is it?  What is it, Sophia?" she gasped.
+
+Sophia still stood with the handkerchief pressed to her face.
+
+"Oh, Sophia, let me call somebody.  Is your face hurt?  Sophia, what is
+the matter with your face?" fairly shrieked Amanda.
+
+Suddenly Sophia took the handkerchief from her face.
+
+"Look at me, Amanda Gill," she said in an awful voice.
+
+Amanda looked, shrinking.
+
+"What is it?  Oh, what is it?  You don't look hurt.  What is it,
+Sophia?"
+
+"What do you see?"
+
+"Why, I see you."
+
+"Me?"
+
+"Yes, you.  What did you think I would see?"
+
+Sophia Gill looked at her sister.  "Never as long as I live will I tell
+you what I thought you would see, and you must never ask me," said she.
+
+"Well, I never will, Sophia," replied Amanda, half weeping with terror.
+
+"You won't try to sleep in that room again, Sophia?"
+
+"No," said Sophia; "and I am going to sell this house."
+
+
+
+
+THE VACANT LOT
+
+
+When it became generally known in Townsend Centre that the Townsends
+were going to move to the city, there was great excitement and dismay.
+For the Townsends to move was about equivalent to the town's moving.
+The Townsend ancestors had founded the village a hundred years ago.
+The first Townsend had kept a wayside hostelry for man and beast, known
+as the "Sign of the Leopard."  The sign-board, on which the leopard was
+painted a bright blue, was still extant, and prominently so, being
+nailed over the present Townsend's front door.  This Townsend, by name
+David, kept the village store.  There had been no tavern since the
+railroad was built through Townsend Centre in his father's day.
+Therefore the family, being ousted by the march of progress from their
+chosen employment, took up with a general country store as being the
+next thing to a country tavern, the principal difference consisting in
+the fact that all the guests were transients, never requiring
+bedchambers, securing their rest on the tops of sugar and flour barrels
+and codfish boxes, and their refreshment from stray nibblings at the
+stock in trade, to the profitless deplenishment of raisins and loaf
+sugar and crackers and cheese.
+
+The flitting of the Townsends from the home of their ancestors was due
+to a sudden access of wealth from the death of a relative and the
+desire of Mrs. Townsend to secure better advantages for her son George,
+sixteen years old, in the way of education, and for her daughter
+Adrianna, ten years older, better matrimonial opportunities.  However,
+this last inducement for leaving Townsend Centre was not openly stated,
+only ingeniously surmised by the neighbours.
+
+"Sarah Townsend don't think there's anybody in Townsend Centre fit for
+her Adrianna to marry, and so she's goin' to take her to Boston to see
+if she can't pick up somebody there," they said.  Then they wondered
+what Abel Lyons would do.  He had been a humble suitor for Adrianna for
+years, but her mother had not approved, and Adrianna, who was dutiful,
+had repulsed him delicately and rather sadly.  He was the only lover
+whom she had ever had, and she felt sorry and grateful; she was a
+plain, awkward girl, and had a patient recognition of the fact.
+
+But her mother was ambitious, more so than her father, who was rather
+pugnaciously satisfied with what he had, and not easily disposed to
+change.  However, he yielded to his wife and consented to sell out his
+business and purchase a house in Boston and move there.
+
+David Townsend was curiously unlike the line of ancestors from whom he
+had come.  He had either retrograded or advanced, as one might look at
+it.  His moral character was certainly better, but he had not the fiery
+spirit and eager grasp at advantage which had distinguished them.
+Indeed, the old Townsends, though prominent and respected as men of
+property and influence, had reputations not above suspicions.  There
+was more than one dark whisper regarding them handed down from mother
+to son in the village, and especially was this true of the first
+Townsend, he who built the tavern bearing the Sign of the Blue Leopard.
+His portrait, a hideous effort of contemporary art, hung in the garret
+of David Townsend's home.  There was many a tale of wild roistering, if
+no worse, in that old roadhouse, and high stakes, and quarreling in
+cups, and blows, and money gotten in evil fashion, and the matter
+hushed up with a high hand for inquirers by the imperious Townsends who
+terrorized everybody.  David Townsend terrorized nobody.  He had gotten
+his little competence from his store by honest methods--the exchanging
+of sterling goods and true weights for country produce and country
+shillings.  He was sober and reliable, with intense self-respect and a
+decided talent for the management of money.  It was principally for
+this reason that he took great delight in his sudden wealth by legacy.
+He had thereby greater opportunities for the exercise of his native
+shrewdness in a bargain.  This he evinced in his purchase of a house in
+Boston.
+
+One day in spring the old Townsend house was shut up, the Blue Leopard
+was taken carefully down from his lair over the front door, the family
+chattels were loaded on the train, and the Townsends departed.  It was
+a sad and eventful day for Townsend Centre.  A man from Barre had
+rented the store--David had decided at the last not to sell--and the
+old familiars congregated in melancholy fashion and talked over the
+situation.  An enormous pride over their departed townsman became
+evident.  They paraded him, flaunting him like a banner in the eyes of
+the new man.  "David is awful smart," they said; "there won't nobody
+get the better of him in the city if he has lived in Townsend Centre
+all his life.  He's got his eyes open.  Know what he paid for his house
+in Boston? Well, sir, that house cost twenty-five thousand dollars, and
+David he bought it for five.  Yes, sir, he did."
+
+"Must have been some out about it," remarked the new man, scowling over
+his counter.  He was beginning to feel his disparaging situation.
+
+"Not an out, sir.  David he made sure on't.  Catch him gettin' bit.
+Everythin' was in apple-pie order, hot an' cold water and all, and in
+one of the best locations of the city--real high-up street. David he
+said the rent in that street was never under a thousand. Yes, sir,
+David he got a bargain--five thousand dollars for a
+twenty-five-thousand-dollar house."
+
+"Some out about it!" growled the new man over the counter.
+
+However, as his fellow townsmen and allies stated, there seemed to be
+no doubt about the desirableness of the city house which David Townsend
+had purchased and the fact that he had secured it for an absurdly low
+price.  The whole family were at first suspicious.  It was ascertained
+that the house had cost a round sum only a few years ago; it was in
+perfect repair; nothing whatever was amiss with plumbing, furnace,
+anything.  There was not even a soap factory within smelling distance,
+as Mrs. Townsend had vaguely surmised.  She was sure that she had heard
+of houses being undesirable for such reasons, but there was no soap
+factory.  They all sniffed and peeked; when the first rainfall came
+they looked at the ceiling, confidently expecting to see dark spots
+where the leaks had commenced, but there were none.  They were forced
+to confess that their suspicions were allayed, that the house was
+perfect, even overshadowed with the mystery of a lower price than it
+was worth.  That, however, was an additional perfection in the opinion
+of the Townsends, who had their share of New England thrift.  They had
+lived just one month in their new house, and were happy, although at
+times somewhat lonely from missing the society of Townsend Centre, when
+the trouble began.  The Townsends, although they lived in a fine house
+in a genteel, almost fashionable, part of the city, were true to their
+antecedents and kept, as they had been accustomed, only one maid.  She
+was the daughter of a farmer on the outskirts of their native village,
+was middle-aged, and had lived with them for the last ten years.  One
+pleasant Monday morning she rose early and did the family washing
+before breakfast, which had been prepared by Mrs. Townsend and
+Adrianna, as was their habit on washing-days.  The family were seated
+at the breakfast table in their basement dining-room, and this maid,
+whose name was Cordelia, was hanging out the clothes in the vacant lot.
+This vacant lot seemed a valuable one, being on a corner.  It was
+rather singular that it had not been built upon. The Townsends had
+wondered at it and agreed that they would have preferred their own
+house to be there.  They had, however, utilized it as far as possible
+with their innocent, rural disregard of property rights in unoccupied
+land.
+
+"We might just as well hang out our washing in that vacant lot," Mrs.
+Townsend had told Cordelia the first Monday of their stay in the house.
+"Our little yard ain't half big enough for all our clothes, and it is
+sunnier there, too."
+
+So Cordelia had hung out the wash there for four Mondays, and this was
+the fifth.  The breakfast was about half finished--they had reached the
+buckwheat cakes--when this maid came rushing into the dining-room and
+stood regarding them, speechless, with a countenance indicative of the
+utmost horror.  She was deadly pale. Her hands, sodden with soapsuds,
+hung twitching at her sides in the folds of her calico gown; her very
+hair, which was light and sparse, seemed to bristle with fear.  All the
+Townsends turned and looked at her.  David and George rose with a
+half-defined idea of burglars.
+
+"Cordelia Battles, what is the matter?" cried Mrs. Townsend. Adrianna
+gasped for breath and turned as white as the maid.  "What is the
+matter?" repeated Mrs. Townsend, but the maid was unable to speak.
+Mrs. Townsend, who could be peremptory, sprang up, ran to the
+frightened woman and shook her violently.  "Cordelia Battles, you
+speak," said she, "and not stand there staring that way, as if you were
+struck dumb!  What is the matter with you?"
+
+Then Cordelia spoke in a fainting voice.
+
+"There's--somebody else--hanging out clothes--in the vacant lot," she
+gasped, and clutched at a chair for support.
+
+"Who?" cried Mrs. Townsend, rousing to indignation, for already she had
+assumed a proprietorship in the vacant lot.  "Is it the folks in the
+next house?  I'd like to know what right they have!  We are next to
+that vacant lot."
+
+"I--dunno--who it is," gasped Cordelia.  "Why, we've seen that girl
+next door go to mass every morning," said Mrs. Townsend.  "She's got a
+fiery red head.  Seems as if you might know her by this time, Cordelia."
+
+"It ain't that girl," gasped Cordelia.  Then she added in a
+horror-stricken voice, "I couldn't see who 'twas."
+
+They all stared.
+
+"Why couldn't you see?" demanded her mistress.  "Are you struck blind?"
+
+"No, ma'am."
+
+"Then why couldn't you see?"
+
+"All I could see was--" Cordelia hesitated, with an expression of the
+utmost horror.
+
+"Go on," said Mrs. Townsend, impatiently.
+
+"All I could see was the shadow of somebody, very slim, hanging out the
+clothes, and--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"I could see the shadows of the things flappin' on their line."
+
+"You couldn't see the clothes?"
+
+"Only the shadow on the ground."
+
+"What kind of clothes were they?"
+
+"Queer," replied Cordelia, with a shudder.
+
+"If I didn't know you so well, I should think you had been drinking,"
+said Mrs. Townsend.  "Now, Cordelia Battles, I'm going out in that
+vacant lot and see myself what you're talking about."
+
+"I can't go," gasped the woman.
+
+With that Mrs. Townsend and all the others, except Adrianna, who
+remained to tremble with the maid, sallied forth into the vacant lot.
+They had to go out the area gate into the street to reach it. It was
+nothing unusual in the way of vacant lots.  One large poplar tree, the
+relic of the old forest which had once flourished there, twinkled in
+one corner; for the rest, it was overgrown with coarse weeds and a few
+dusty flowers.  The Townsends stood just inside the rude board fence
+which divided the lot from the street and stared with wonder and
+horror, for Cordelia had told the truth.  They all saw what she had
+described--the shadow of an exceedingly slim woman moving along the
+ground with up-stretched arms, the shadows of strange, nondescript
+garments flapping from a shadowy line, but when they looked up for the
+substance of the shadows nothing was to be seen except the clear, blue
+October air.
+
+"My goodness!" gasped Mrs. Townsend.  Her face assumed a strange
+gathering of wrath in the midst of her terror.  Suddenly she made a
+determined move forward, although her husband strove to hold her back.
+
+"You let me be," said she.  She moved forward.  Then she recoiled and
+gave a loud shriek.  "The wet sheet flapped in my face," she cried.
+"Take me away, take me away!"  Then she fainted.  Between them they got
+her back to the house.  "It was awful," she moaned when she came to
+herself, with the family all around her where she lay on the
+dining-room floor.  "Oh, David, what do you suppose it is?"
+
+"Nothing at all," replied David Townsend stoutly.  He was remarkable
+for courage and staunch belief in actualities.  He was now denying to
+himself that he had seen anything unusual.
+
+"Oh, there was," moaned his wife.
+
+"I saw something," said George, in a sullen, boyish bass.
+
+The maid sobbed convulsively and so did Adrianna for sympathy.
+
+"We won't talk any about it," said David.  "Here, Jane, you drink this
+hot tea--it will do you good; and Cordelia, you hang out the clothes in
+our own yard.  George, you go and put up the line for her."
+
+"The line is out there," said George, with a jerk of his shoulder.
+
+"Are you afraid?"
+
+"No, I ain't," replied the boy resentfully, and went out with a pale
+face.
+
+After that Cordelia hung the Townsend wash in the yard of their own
+house, standing always with her back to the vacant lot.  As for David
+Townsend, he spent a good deal of his time in the lot watching the
+shadows, but he came to no explanation, although he strove to satisfy
+himself with many.
+
+"I guess the shadows come from the smoke from our chimneys, or else the
+poplar tree," he said.
+
+"Why do the shadows come on Monday mornings, and no other?" demanded
+his wife.
+
+David was silent.
+
+Very soon new mysteries arose.  One day Cordelia rang the dinner-bell
+at their usual dinner hour, the same as in Townsend Centre, high noon,
+and the family assembled.  With amazement Adrianna looked at the dishes
+on the table.
+
+"Why, that's queer!" she said.
+
+"What's queer?" asked her mother.
+
+Cordelia stopped short as she was about setting a tumbler of water
+beside a plate, and the water slopped over.
+
+"Why," said Adrianna, her face paling, "I--thought there was boiled
+dinner.  I--smelt cabbage cooking."
+
+"I knew there would something else come up," gasped Cordelia, leaning
+hard on the back of Adrianna's chair.
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Mrs. Townsend sharply, but her own face began
+to assume the shocked pallour which it was so easy nowadays for all
+their faces to assume at the merest suggestion of anything out of the
+common.
+
+"I smelt cabbage cooking all the morning up in my room," Adrianna said
+faintly, "and here's codfish and potatoes for dinner."
+
+The Townsends all looked at one another.  David rose with an
+exclamation and rushed out of the room.  The others waited tremblingly.
+When he came back his face was lowering.
+
+"What did you--" Mrs. Townsend asked hesitatingly.
+
+"There's some smell of cabbage out there," he admitted reluctantly.
+Then he looked at her with a challenge.  "It comes from the next
+house," he said.  "Blows over our house."
+
+"Our house is higher."
+
+"I don't care; you can never account for such things."
+
+"Cordelia," said Mrs. Townsend, "you go over to the next house and you
+ask if they've got cabbage for dinner."
+
+Cordelia switched out of the room, her mouth set hard.  She came back
+promptly.
+
+"Says they never have cabbage," she announced with gloomy triumph and a
+conclusive glance at Mr. Townsend.  "Their girl was real sassy."
+
+"Oh, father, let's move away; let's sell the house," cried Adrianna in
+a panic-stricken tone.
+
+"If you think I'm going to sell a house that I got as cheap as this one
+because we smell cabbage in a vacant lot, you're mistaken," replied
+David firmly.
+
+"It isn't the cabbage alone," said Mrs. Townsend.
+
+"And a few shadows," added David.  "I am tired of such nonsense.  I
+thought you had more sense, Jane."
+
+"One of the boys at school asked me if we lived in the house next to
+the vacant lot on Wells Street and whistled when I said 'Yes,'"
+remarked George.
+
+"Let him whistle," said Mr. Townsend.
+
+After a few hours the family, stimulated by Mr. Townsend's calm, common
+sense, agreed that it was exceedingly foolish to be disturbed by a
+mysterious odour of cabbage.  They even laughed at themselves.
+
+"I suppose we have got so nervous over those shadows hanging out
+clothes that we notice every little thing," conceded Mrs. Townsend.
+
+"You will find out some day that that is no more to be regarded than
+the cabbage," said her husband.
+
+"You can't account for that wet sheet hitting my face," said Mrs.
+Townsend, doubtfully.
+
+"You imagined it."
+
+"I FELT it."
+
+That afternoon things went on as usual in the household until nearly
+four o'clock.  Adrianna went downtown to do some shopping. Mrs.
+Townsend sat sewing beside the bay window in her room, which was a
+front one in the third story.  George had not got home.  Mr. Townsend
+was writing a letter in the library.  Cordelia was busy in the
+basement; the twilight, which was coming earlier and earlier every
+night, was beginning to gather, when suddenly there was a loud crash
+which shook the house from its foundations.  Even the dishes on the
+sideboard rattled, and the glasses rang like bells. The pictures on the
+walls of Mrs. Townsend's room swung out from the walls.  But that was
+not all: every looking-glass in the house cracked simultaneously--as
+nearly as they could judge--from top to bottom, then shivered into
+fragments over the floors.  Mrs. Townsend was too frightened to scream.
+She sat huddled in her chair, gasping for breath, her eyes, rolling
+from side to side in incredulous terror, turned toward the street.  She
+saw a great black group of people crossing it just in front of the
+vacant lot. There was something inexpressibly strange and gloomy about
+this moving group; there was an effect of sweeping, wavings and
+foldings of sable draperies and gleams of deadly white faces; then they
+passed.  She twisted her head to see, and they disappeared in the
+vacant lot.  Mr. Townsend came hurrying into the room; he was pale, and
+looked at once angry and alarmed.
+
+"Did you fall?" he asked inconsequently, as if his wife, who was small,
+could have produced such a manifestation by a fall.
+
+"Oh, David, what is it?" whispered Mrs. Townsend.
+
+"Darned if I know!" said David.
+
+"Don't swear.  It's too awful.  Oh, see the looking-glass, David!"
+
+"I see it.  The one over the library mantel is broken, too."
+
+"Oh, it is a sign of death!"
+
+Cordelia's feet were heard as she staggered on the stairs.  She almost
+fell into the room.  She reeled over to Mr. Townsend and clutched his
+arm.  He cast a sidewise glance, half furious, half commiserating at
+her.
+
+"Well, what is it all about?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know.  What is it?  Oh, what is it?  The looking-glass in the
+kitchen is broken.  All over the floor.  Oh, oh!  What is it?"
+
+"I don't know any more than you do.  I didn't do it."
+
+"Lookin'-glasses broken is a sign of death in the house," said
+Cordelia.  "If it's me, I hope I'm ready; but I'd rather die than be so
+scared as I've been lately."
+
+Mr. Townsend shook himself loose and eyed the two trembling women with
+gathering resolution.
+
+"Now, look here, both of you," he said.  "This is nonsense.  You'll die
+sure enough of fright if you keep on this way.  I was a fool myself to
+be startled.  Everything it is is an earthquake."
+
+"Oh, David!" gasped his wife, not much reassured.
+
+"It is nothing but an earthquake," persisted Mr. Townsend.  "It acted
+just like that.  Things always are broken on the walls, and the middle
+of the room isn't affected.  I've read about it."
+
+Suddenly Mrs. Townsend gave a loud shriek and pointed.
+
+"How do you account for that," she cried, "if it's an earthquake? Oh,
+oh, oh!"
+
+She was on the verge of hysterics.  Her husband held her firmly by the
+arm as his eyes followed the direction of her rigid pointing finger.
+Cordelia looked also, her eyes seeming converged to a bright point of
+fear.  On the floor in front of the broken looking-glass lay a mass of
+black stuff in a grewsome long ridge.
+
+"It's something you dropped there," almost shouted Mr. Townsend.
+
+"It ain't.  Oh!"
+
+Mr. Townsend dropped his wife's arm and took one stride toward the
+object.  It was a very long crape veil.  He lifted it, and it floated
+out from his arm as if imbued with electricity.
+
+"It's yours," he said to his wife.
+
+"Oh, David, I never had one.  You know, oh, you know
+I--shouldn't--unless you died.  How came it there?"
+
+"I'm darned if I know," said David, regarding it.  He was deadly pale,
+but still resentful rather than afraid.
+
+"Don't hold it; don't!"
+
+"I'd like to know what in thunder all this means?" said David.  He gave
+the thing an angry toss and it fell on the floor in exactly the same
+long heap as before.
+
+Cordelia began to weep with racking sobs.  Mrs. Townsend reached out
+and caught her husband's hand, clutching it hard with ice-cold fingers.
+
+"What's got into this house, anyhow?" he growled.
+
+"You'll have to sell it.  Oh, David, we can't live here."
+
+"As for my selling a house I paid only five thousand for when it's
+worth twenty-five, for any such nonsense as this, I won't!"
+
+David gave one stride toward the black veil, but it rose from the floor
+and moved away before him across the room at exactly the same height as
+if suspended from a woman's head.  He pursued it, clutching vainly, all
+around the room, then he swung himself on his heel with an exclamation
+and the thing fell to the floor again in the long heap.  Then were
+heard hurrying feet on the stairs and Adrianna burst into the room.
+She ran straight to her father and clutched his arm; she tried to
+speak, but she chattered unintelligibly; her face was blue.  Her father
+shook her violently.
+
+"Adrianna, do have more sense!" he cried.
+
+"Oh, David, how can you talk so?" sobbed her mother.
+
+"I can't help it.  I'm mad!" said he with emphasis.  "What has got into
+this house and you all, anyhow?"
+
+"What is it, Adrianna, poor child," asked her mother.  "Only look what
+has happened here."
+
+"It's an earthquake," said her father staunchly; "nothing to be afraid
+of."
+
+"How do you account for THAT?" said Mrs. Townsend in an awful voice,
+pointing to the veil.
+
+Adrianna did not look--she was too engrossed with her own terrors. She
+began to speak in a breathless voice.
+
+"I--was--coming--by the vacant lot," she panted, "and--I--I--had my new
+hat in a paper bag and--a parcel of blue ribbon, and--I saw a crowd, an
+awful--oh! a whole crowd of people with white faces, as if--they were
+dressed all in black."
+
+"Where are they now?"
+
+"I don't know.  Oh!" Adrianna sank gasping feebly into a chair.
+
+"Get her some water, David," sobbed her mother.
+
+David rushed with an impatient exclamation out of the room and returned
+with a glass of water which he held to his daughter's lips.
+
+"Here, drink this!" he said roughly.
+
+"Oh, David, how can you speak so?" sobbed his wife.
+
+"I can't help it.  I'm mad clean through," said David.
+
+Then there was a hard bound upstairs, and George entered.  He was very
+white, but he grinned at them with an appearance of unconcern.
+
+"Hullo!" he said in a shaking voice, which he tried to control. "What
+on earth's to pay in that vacant lot now?"
+
+"Well, what is it?" demanded his father.
+
+"Oh, nothing, only--well, there are lights over it exactly as if there
+was a house there, just about where the windows would be.  It looked as
+if you could walk right in, but when you look close there are those old
+dried-up weeds rattling away on the ground the same as ever.  I looked
+at it and couldn't believe my eyes.  A woman saw it, too.  She came
+along just as I did.  She gave one look, then she screeched and ran.  I
+waited for some one else, but nobody came."
+
+Mr. Townsend rushed out of the room.
+
+"I daresay it'll be gone when he gets there," began George, then he
+stared round the room.  "What's to pay here?" he cried.
+
+"Oh, George, the whole house shook all at once, and all the
+looking-glasses broke," wailed his mother, and Adrianna and Cordelia
+joined.
+
+George whistled with pale lips.  Then Mr. Townsend entered.
+
+"Well," asked George, "see anything?"
+
+"I don't want to talk," said his father.  "I've stood just about
+enough."
+
+"We've got to sell out and go back to Townsend Centre," cried his wife
+in a wild voice.  "Oh, David, say you'll go back."
+
+"I won't go back for any such nonsense as this, and sell a twenty-five
+thousand dollar house for five thousand," said he firmly.
+
+But that very night his resolution was shaken.  The whole family
+watched together in the dining-room.  They were all afraid to go to
+bed--that is, all except possibly Mr. Townsend.  Mrs. Townsend declared
+firmly that she for one would leave that awful house and go back to
+Townsend Centre whether he came or not, unless they all stayed together
+and watched, and Mr. Townsend yielded.  They chose the dining-room for
+the reason that it was nearer the street should they wish to make their
+egress hurriedly, and they took up their station around the
+dining-table on which Cordelia had placed a luncheon.
+
+"It looks exactly as if we were watching with a corpse," she said in a
+horror-stricken whisper.
+
+"Hold your tongue if you can't talk sense," said Mr. Townsend.
+
+The dining-room was very large, finished in oak, with a dark blue paper
+above the wainscotting.  The old sign of the tavern, the Blue Leopard,
+hung over the mantel-shelf.  Mr. Townsend had insisted on hanging it
+there.  He had a curious pride in it.  The family sat together until
+after midnight and nothing unusual happened.  Mrs. Townsend began to
+nod; Mr. Townsend read the paper ostentatiously. Adrianna and Cordelia
+stared with roving eyes about the room, then at each other as if
+comparing notes on terror.  George had a book which he studied
+furtively.  All at once Adrianna gave a startled exclamation and
+Cordelia echoed her.  George whistled faintly. Mrs. Townsend awoke with
+a start and Mr. Townsend's paper rattled to the floor.
+
+"Look!" gasped Adrianna.
+
+The sign of the Blue Leopard over the shelf glowed as if a lantern hung
+over it.  The radiance was thrown from above.  It grew brighter and
+brighter as they watched.  The Blue Leopard seemed to crouch and spring
+with life.  Then the door into the front hall opened--the outer door,
+which had been carefully locked.  It squeaked and they all recognized
+it.  They sat staring.  Mr. Townsend was as transfixed as the rest.
+They heard the outer door shut, then the door into the room swung open
+and slowly that awful black group of people which they had seen in the
+afternoon entered. The Townsends with one accord rose and huddled
+together in a far corner; they all held to each other and stared.  The
+people, their faces gleaming with a whiteness of death, their black
+robes waving and folding, crossed the room.  They were a trifle above
+mortal height, or seemed so to the terrified eyes which saw them.  They
+reached the mantel-shelf where the sign-board hung, then a black-draped
+long arm was seen to rise and make a motion, as if plying a knocker.
+Then the whole company passed out of sight, as if through the wall, and
+the room was as before.  Mrs. Townsend was shaking in a nervous chill,
+Adrianna was almost fainting, Cordelia was in hysterics.  David
+Townsend stood glaring in a curious way at the sign of the Blue
+Leopard.  George stared at him with a look of horror.  There was
+something in his father's face which made him forget everything else.
+At last he touched his arm timidly.
+
+"Father," he whispered.
+
+David turned and regarded him with a look of rage and fury, then his
+face cleared; he passed his hand over his forehead.
+
+"Good Lord!  What DID come to me?" he muttered.
+
+"You looked like that awful picture of old Tom Townsend in the garret
+in Townsend Centre, father," whimpered the boy, shuddering.
+
+"Should think I might look like 'most any old cuss after such darned
+work as this," growled David, but his face was white.  "Go and pour out
+some hot tea for your mother," he ordered the boy sharply.  He himself
+shook Cordelia violently.  "Stop such actions!" he shouted in her ears,
+and shook her again.  "Ain't you a church member?" he demanded; "what
+be you afraid of?  You ain't done nothin' wrong, have ye?"
+
+Then Cordelia quoted Scripture in a burst of sobs and laughter.
+
+"Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive
+me," she cried out.  "If I ain't done wrong, mebbe them that's come
+before me did, and when the Evil One and the Powers of Darkness is
+abroad I'm liable, I'm liable!" Then she laughed loud and long and
+shrill.
+
+"If you don't hush up," said David, but still with that white terror
+and horror on his own face, "I'll bundle you out in that vacant lot
+whether or no.  I mean it."
+
+Then Cordelia was quiet, after one wild roll of her eyes at him. The
+colour was returning to Adrianna's cheeks; her mother was drinking hot
+tea in spasmodic gulps.
+
+"It's after midnight," she gasped, "and I don't believe they'll come
+again to-night.  Do you, David?"
+
+"No, I don't," said David conclusively.
+
+"Oh, David, we mustn't stay another night in this awful house."
+
+"We won't.  To-morrow we'll pack off bag and baggage to Townsend
+Centre, if it takes all the fire department to move us," said David.
+
+Adrianna smiled in the midst of her terror.  She thought of Abel Lyons.
+
+The next day Mr. Townsend went to the real estate agent who had sold
+him the house.
+
+"It's no use," he said, "I can't stand it.  Sell the house for what you
+can get.  I'll give it away rather than keep it."
+
+Then he added a few strong words as to his opinion of parties who sold
+him such an establishment.  But the agent pleaded innocent for the most
+part.
+
+"I'll own I suspected something wrong when the owner, who pledged me to
+secrecy as to his name, told me to sell that place for what I could
+get, and did not limit me.  I had never heard anything, but I began to
+suspect something was wrong.  Then I made a few inquiries and found out
+that there was a rumour in the neighbourhood that there was something
+out of the usual about that vacant lot.  I had wondered myself why it
+wasn't built upon.  There was a story about it's being undertaken once,
+and the contract made, and the contractor dying; then another man took
+it and one of the workmen was killed on his way to dig the cellar, and
+the others struck.  I didn't pay much attention to it.  I never
+believed much in that sort of thing anyhow, and then, too, I couldn't
+find out that there had ever been anything wrong about the house
+itself, except as the people who had lived there were said to have seen
+and heard queer things in the vacant lot, so I thought you might be
+able to get along, especially as you didn't look like a man who was
+timid, and the house was such a bargain as I never handled before.  But
+this you tell me is beyond belief."
+
+"Do you know the names of the people who formerly owned the vacant
+lot?" asked Mr. Townsend.
+
+"I don't know for certain," replied the agent, "for the original owners
+flourished long before your or my day, but I do know that the lot goes
+by the name of the old Gaston lot.  What's the matter? Are you ill?"
+
+"No; it is nothing," replied Mr. Townsend.  "Get what you can for the
+house; perhaps another family might not be as troubled as we have been."
+
+"I hope you are not going to leave the city?" said the agent, urbanely.
+
+"I am going back to Townsend Centre as fast as steam can carry me after
+we get packed up and out of that cursed house," replied Mr. David
+Townsend.
+
+He did not tell the agent nor any of his family what had caused him to
+start when told the name of the former owners of the lot.  He
+remembered all at once the story of a ghastly murder which had taken
+place in the Blue Leopard.  The victim's name was Gaston and the
+murderer had never been discovered.
+
+
+
+
+THE LOST GHOST
+
+
+Mrs. John Emerson, sitting with her needlework beside the window,
+looked out and saw Mrs. Rhoda Meserve coming down the street, and knew
+at once by the trend of her steps and the cant of her head that she
+meditated turning in at her gate.  She also knew by a certain something
+about her general carriage--a thrusting forward of the neck, a bustling
+hitch of the shoulders--that she had important news.  Rhoda Meserve
+always had the news as soon as the news was in being, and generally
+Mrs. John Emerson was the first to whom she imparted it.  The two women
+had been friends ever since Mrs. Meserve had married Simon Meserve and
+come to the village to live.
+
+Mrs. Meserve was a pretty woman, moving with graceful flirts of
+ruffling skirts; her clear-cut, nervous face, as delicately tinted as a
+shell, looked brightly from the plumy brim of a black hat at Mrs.
+Emerson in the window.  Mrs. Emerson was glad to see her coming.  She
+returned the greeting with enthusiasm, then rose hurriedly, ran into
+the cold parlour and brought out one of the best rocking-chairs.  She
+was just in time, after drawing it up beside the opposite window, to
+greet her friend at the door.
+
+"Good-afternoon," said she.  "I declare, I'm real glad to see you. I've
+been alone all day.  John went to the city this morning.  I thought of
+coming over to your house this afternoon, but I couldn't bring my
+sewing very well.  I am putting the ruffles on my new black dress
+skirt."
+
+"Well, I didn't have a thing on hand except my crochet work," responded
+Mrs. Meserve, "and I thought I'd just run over a few minutes."
+
+"I'm real glad you did," repeated Mrs. Emerson.  "Take your things
+right off.  Here, I'll put them on my bed in the bedroom.  Take the
+rocking-chair."
+
+Mrs. Meserve settled herself in the parlour rocking-chair, while Mrs.
+Emerson carried her shawl and hat into the little adjoining bedroom.
+When she returned Mrs. Meserve was rocking peacefully and was already
+at work hooking blue wool in and out.
+
+"That's real pretty," said Mrs. Emerson.
+
+"Yes, I think it's pretty," replied Mrs. Meserve.
+
+"I suppose it's for the church fair?"
+
+"Yes.  I don't suppose it'll bring enough to pay for the worsted, let
+alone the work, but I suppose I've got to make something."
+
+"How much did that one you made for the fair last year bring?"
+
+"Twenty-five cents."
+
+"It's wicked, ain't it?"
+
+"I rather guess it is.  It takes me a week every minute I can get to
+make one.  I wish those that bought such things for twenty-five cents
+had to make them.  Guess they'd sing another song.  Well, I suppose I
+oughtn't to complain as long as it is for the Lord, but sometimes it
+does seem as if the Lord didn't get much out of it."
+
+"Well, it's pretty work," said Mrs. Emerson, sitting down at the
+opposite window and taking up her dress skirt.
+
+"Yes, it is real pretty work.  I just LOVE to crochet."
+
+The two women rocked and sewed and crocheted in silence for two or
+three minutes.  They were both waiting.  Mrs. Meserve waited for the
+other's curiosity to develop in order that her news might have, as it
+were, a befitting stage entrance.  Mrs. Emerson waited for the news.
+Finally she could wait no longer.
+
+"Well, what's the news?" said she.
+
+"Well, I don't know as there's anything very particular," hedged the
+other woman, prolonging the situation.
+
+"Yes, there is; you can't cheat me," replied Mrs. Emerson.
+
+"Now, how do you know?"
+
+"By the way you look."
+
+Mrs. Meserve laughed consciously and rather vainly.
+
+"Well, Simon says my face is so expressive I can't hide anything more
+than five minutes no matter how hard I try," said she.  "Well, there is
+some news.  Simon came home with it this noon.  He heard it in South
+Dayton.  He had some business over there this morning. The old Sargent
+place is let."
+
+Mrs. Emerson dropped her sewing and stared.
+
+"You don't say so!"
+
+"Yes, it is."
+
+"Who to?"
+
+"Why, some folks from Boston that moved to South Dayton last year. They
+haven't been satisfied with the house they had there--it wasn't large
+enough.  The man has got considerable property and can afford to live
+pretty well.  He's got a wife and his unmarried sister in the family.
+The sister's got money, too.  He does business in Boston and it's just
+as easy to get to Boston from here as from South Dayton, and so they're
+coming here.  You know the old Sargent house is a splendid place."
+
+"Yes, it's the handsomest house in town, but--"
+
+"Oh, Simon said they told him about that and he just laughed.  Said he
+wasn't afraid and neither was his wife and sister.  Said he'd risk
+ghosts rather than little tucked-up sleeping-rooms without any sun,
+like they've had in the Dayton house.  Said he'd rather risk SEEING
+ghosts, than risk being ghosts themselves.  Simon said they said he was
+a great hand to joke."
+
+"Oh, well," said Mrs. Emerson, "it is a beautiful house, and maybe
+there isn't anything in those stories.  It never seemed to me they came
+very straight anyway.  I never took much stock in them.  All I thought
+was--if his wife was nervous."
+
+"Nothing in creation would hire me to go into a house that I'd ever
+heard a word against of that kind," declared Mrs. Meserve with
+emphasis.  "I wouldn't go into that house if they would give me the
+rent.  I've seen enough of haunted houses to last me as long as I live."
+
+Mrs. Emerson's face acquired the expression of a hunting hound.
+
+"Have you?" she asked in an intense whisper.
+
+"Yes, I have.  I don't want any more of it."
+
+"Before you came here?"
+
+"Yes; before I was married--when I was quite a girl."
+
+Mrs. Meserve had not married young.  Mrs. Emerson had mental
+calculations when she heard that.
+
+"Did you really live in a house that was--" she whispered fearfully.
+
+Mrs. Meserve nodded solemnly.
+
+"Did you really ever--see--anything--"
+
+Mrs. Meserve nodded.
+
+"You didn't see anything that did you any harm?"
+
+"No, I didn't see anything that did me harm looking at it in one way,
+but it don't do anybody in this world any good to see things that
+haven't any business to be seen in it.  You never get over it."
+
+There was a moment's silence.  Mrs. Emerson's features seemed to
+sharpen.
+
+"Well, of course I don't want to urge you," said she, "if you don't
+feel like talking about it; but maybe it might do you good to tell it
+out, if it's on your mind, worrying you."
+
+"I try to put it out of my mind," said Mrs. Meserve.
+
+"Well, it's just as you feel."
+
+"I never told anybody but Simon," said Mrs. Meserve.  "I never felt as
+if it was wise perhaps.  I didn't know what folks might think. So many
+don't believe in anything they can't understand, that they might think
+my mind wasn't right.  Simon advised me not to talk about it.  He said
+he didn't believe it was anything supernatural, but he had to own up
+that he couldn't give any explanation for it to save his life.  He had
+to own up that he didn't believe anybody could.  Then he said he
+wouldn't talk about it.  He said lots of folks would sooner tell folks
+my head wasn't right than to own up they couldn't see through it."
+
+"I'm sure I wouldn't say so," returned Mrs. Emerson reproachfully. "You
+know better than that, I hope."
+
+"Yes, I do," replied Mrs. Meserve.  "I know you wouldn't say so."
+
+"And I wouldn't tell it to a soul if you didn't want me to."
+
+"Well, I'd rather you wouldn't."
+
+"I won't speak of it even to Mr. Emerson."
+
+"I'd rather you wouldn't even to him."
+
+"I won't."
+
+Mrs. Emerson took up her dress skirt again; Mrs. Meserve hooked up
+another loop of blue wool.  Then she begun:
+
+"Of course," said she, "I ain't going to say positively that I believe
+or disbelieve in ghosts, but all I tell you is what I saw. I can't
+explain it.  I don't pretend I can, for I can't.  If you can, well and
+good; I shall be glad, for it will stop tormenting me as it has done
+and always will otherwise.  There hasn't been a day nor a night since
+it happened that I haven't thought of it, and always I have felt the
+shivers go down my back when I did."
+
+"That's an awful feeling," Mrs. Emerson said.
+
+"Ain't it?  Well, it happened before I was married, when I was a girl
+and lived in East Wilmington.  It was the first year I lived there.
+You know my family all died five years before that.  I told you."
+
+Mrs. Emerson nodded.
+
+"Well, I went there to teach school, and I went to board with a Mrs.
+Amelia Dennison and her sister, Mrs. Bird.  Abby, her name was--Abby
+Bird.  She was a widow; she had never had any children. She had a
+little money--Mrs. Dennison didn't have any--and she had come to East
+Wilmington and bought the house they lived in.  It was a real pretty
+house, though it was very old and run down.  It had cost Mrs. Bird a
+good deal to put it in order.  I guess that was the reason they took me
+to board.  I guess they thought it would help along a little.  I guess
+what I paid for my board about kept us all in victuals.  Mrs. Bird had
+enough to live on if they were careful, but she had spent so much
+fixing up the old house that they must have been a little pinched for
+awhile.
+
+"Anyhow, they took me to board, and I thought I was pretty lucky to get
+in there.  I had a nice room, big and sunny and furnished pretty, the
+paper and paint all new, and everything as neat as wax. Mrs. Dennison
+was one of the best cooks I ever saw, and I had a little stove in my
+room, and there was always a nice fire there when I got home from
+school.  I thought I hadn't been in such a nice place since I lost my
+own home, until I had been there about three weeks.
+
+"I had been there about three weeks before I found it out, though I
+guess it had been going on ever since they had been in the house, and
+that was most four months.  They hadn't said anything about it, and I
+didn't wonder, for there they had just bought the house and been to so
+much expense and trouble fixing it up.
+
+"Well, I went there in September.  I begun my school the first Monday.
+I remember it was a real cold fall, there was a frost the middle of
+September, and I had to put on my winter coat.  I remember when I came
+home that night (let me see, I began school on a Monday, and that was
+two weeks from the next Thursday), I took off my coat downstairs and
+laid it on the table in the front entry. It was a real nice coat--heavy
+black broadcloth trimmed with fur; I had had it the winter before.
+Mrs. Bird called after me as I went upstairs that I ought not to leave
+it in the front entry for fear somebody might come in and take it, but
+I only laughed and called back to her that I wasn't afraid.  I never
+was much afraid of burglars.
+
+"Well, though it was hardly the middle of September, it was a real cold
+night.  I remember my room faced west, and the sun was getting low, and
+the sky was a pale yellow and purple, just as you see it sometimes in
+the winter when there is going to be a cold snap.  I rather think that
+was the night the frost came the first time.  I know Mrs. Dennison
+covered up some flowers she had in the front yard, anyhow.  I remember
+looking out and seeing an old green plaid shawl of hers over the
+verbena bed.  There was a fire in my little wood-stove.  Mrs. Bird made
+it, I know.  She was a real motherly sort of woman; she always seemed
+to be the happiest when she was doing something to make other folks
+happy and comfortable.  Mrs. Dennison told me she had always been so.
+She said she had coddled her husband within an inch of his life.  'It's
+lucky Abby never had any children,' she said, 'for she would have
+spoilt them.'
+
+"Well, that night I sat down beside my nice little fire and ate an
+apple.  There was a plate of nice apples on my table.  Mrs. Bird put
+them there.  I was always very fond of apples.  Well, I sat down and
+ate an apple, and was having a beautiful time, and thinking how lucky I
+was to have got board in such a place with such nice folks, when I
+heard a queer little sound at my door.  It was such a little hesitating
+sort of sound that it sounded more like a fumble than a knock, as if
+some one very timid, with very little hands, was feeling along the
+door, not quite daring to knock.  For a minute I thought it was a
+mouse.  But I waited and it came again, and then I made up my mind it
+was a knock, but a very little scared one, so I said, 'Come in.'
+
+"But nobody came in, and then presently I heard the knock again. Then I
+got up and opened the door, thinking it was very queer, and I had a
+frightened feeling without knowing why.
+
+"Well, I opened the door, and the first thing I noticed was a draught
+of cold air, as if the front door downstairs was open, but there was a
+strange close smell about the cold draught.  It smelled more like a
+cellar that had been shut up for years, than out-of-doors.  Then I saw
+something.  I saw my coat first.  The thing that held it was so small
+that I couldn't see much of anything else. Then I saw a little white
+face with eyes so scared and wishful that they seemed as if they might
+eat a hole in anybody's heart.  It was a dreadful little face, with
+something about it which made it different from any other face on
+earth, but it was so pitiful that somehow it did away a good deal with
+the dreadfulness.  And there were two little hands spotted purple with
+the cold, holding up my winter coat, and a strange little far-away
+voice said: 'I can't find my mother.'
+
+"'For Heaven's sake,' I said, 'who are you?'
+
+"Then the little voice said again: 'I can't find my mother.'
+
+"All the time I could smell the cold and I saw that it was about the
+child; that cold was clinging to her as if she had come out of some
+deadly cold place.  Well, I took my coat, I did not know what else to
+do, and the cold was clinging to that.  It was as cold as if it had
+come off ice.  When I had the coat I could see the child more plainly.
+She was dressed in one little white garment made very simply.  It was a
+nightgown, only very long, quite covering her feet, and I could see
+dimly through it her little thin body mottled purple with the cold.
+Her face did not look so cold; that was a clear waxen white.  Her hair
+was dark, but it looked as if it might be dark only because it was so
+damp, almost wet, and might really be light hair.  It clung very close
+to her forehead, which was round and white.  She would have been very
+beautiful if she had not been so dreadful.
+
+"'Who are you?' says I again, looking at her.
+
+"She looked at me with her terrible pleading eyes and did not say
+anything.
+
+"'What are you?' says I.  Then she went away.  She did not seem to run
+or walk like other children.  She flitted, like one of those little
+filmy white butterflies, that don't seem like real ones they are so
+light, and move as if they had no weight.  But she looked back from the
+head of the stairs.  'I can't find my mother,' said she, and I never
+heard such a voice.
+
+"'Who is your mother?' says I, but she was gone.
+
+"Well, I thought for a moment I should faint away.  The room got dark
+and I heard a singing in my ears.  Then I flung my coat onto the bed.
+My hands were as cold as ice from holding it, and I stood in my door,
+and called first Mrs. Bird and then Mrs. Dennison.  I didn't dare go
+down over the stairs where that had gone.  It seemed to me I should go
+mad if I didn't see somebody or something like other folks on the face
+of the earth.  I thought I should never make anybody hear, but I could
+hear them stepping about downstairs, and I could smell biscuits baking
+for supper.  Somehow the smell of those biscuits seemed the only
+natural thing left to keep me in my right mind.  I didn't dare go over
+those stairs.  I just stood there and called, and finally I heard the
+entry door open and Mrs. Bird called back:
+
+"'What is it?  Did you call, Miss Arms?'
+
+"'Come up here; come up here as quick as you can, both of you,' I
+screamed out; 'quick, quick, quick!'
+
+"I heard Mrs. Bird tell Mrs. Dennison: 'Come quick, Amelia, something
+is the matter in Miss Arms' room.'  It struck me even then that she
+expressed herself rather queerly, and it struck me as very queer,
+indeed, when they both got upstairs and I saw that they knew what had
+happened, or that they knew of what nature the happening was.
+
+"'What is it, dear?' asked Mrs. Bird, and her pretty, loving voice had
+a strained sound.  I saw her look at Mrs. Dennison and I saw Mrs.
+Dennison look back at her.
+
+"'For God's sake,' says I, and I never spoke so before--'for God's
+sake, what was it brought my coat upstairs?'
+
+"'What was it like?' asked Mrs. Dennison in a sort of failing voice,
+and she looked at her sister again and her sister looked back at her.
+
+"'It was a child I have never seen here before.  It looked like a
+child,' says I, 'but I never saw a child so dreadful, and it had on a
+nightgown, and said she couldn't find her mother.  Who was it? What was
+it?'
+
+"I thought for a minute Mrs. Dennison was going to faint, but Mrs. Bird
+hung onto her and rubbed her hands, and whispered in her ear (she had
+the cooingest kind of voice), and I ran and got her a glass of cold
+water.  I tell you it took considerable courage to go downstairs alone,
+but they had set a lamp on the entry table so I could see.  I don't
+believe I could have spunked up enough to have gone downstairs in the
+dark, thinking every second that child might be close to me.  The lamp
+and the smell of the biscuits baking seemed to sort of keep my courage
+up, but I tell you I didn't waste much time going down those stairs and
+out into the kitchen for a glass of water.  I pumped as if the house
+was afire, and I grabbed the first thing I came across in the shape of
+a tumbler: it was a painted one that Mrs. Dennison's Sunday school
+class gave her, and it was meant for a flower vase.
+
+"Well, I filled it and then ran upstairs.  I felt every minute as if
+something would catch my feet, and I held the glass to Mrs. Dennison's
+lips, while Mrs. Bird held her head up, and she took a good long
+swallow, then she looked hard at the tumbler.
+
+"'Yes,' says I, 'I know I got this one, but I took the first I came
+across, and it isn't hurt a mite.'
+
+"'Don't get the painted flowers wet,' says Mrs. Dennison very feebly,
+'they'll wash off if you do.'
+
+"'I'll be real careful,' says I.  I knew she set a sight by that
+painted tumbler.
+
+"The water seemed to do Mrs. Dennison good, for presently she pushed
+Mrs. Bird away and sat up.  She had been laying down on my bed.
+
+"'I'm all over it now,' says she, but she was terribly white, and her
+eyes looked as if they saw something outside things.  Mrs. Bird wasn't
+much better, but she always had a sort of settled sweet, good look that
+nothing could disturb to any great extent.  I knew I looked dreadful,
+for I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass, and I would hardly have
+known who it was.
+
+"Mrs. Dennison, she slid off the bed and walked sort of tottery to a
+chair.  'I was silly to give way so,' says she.
+
+"'No, you wasn't silly, sister,' says Mrs. Bird.  'I don't know what
+this means any more than you do, but whatever it is, no one ought to be
+called silly for being overcome by anything so different from other
+things which we have known all our lives.'
+
+"Mrs. Dennison looked at her sister, then she looked at me, then back
+at her sister again, and Mrs. Bird spoke as if she had been asked a
+question.
+
+"'Yes,' says she, 'I do think Miss Arms ought to be told--that is, I
+think she ought to be told all we know ourselves.'
+
+"'That isn't much,' said Mrs. Dennison with a dying-away sort of sigh.
+She looked as if she might faint away again any minute.  She was a real
+delicate-looking woman, but it turned out she was a good deal stronger
+than poor Mrs. Bird.
+
+"'No, there isn't much we do know,' says Mrs. Bird, 'but what little
+there is she ought to know.  I felt as if she ought to when she first
+came here.'
+
+"'Well, I didn't feel quite right about it,' said Mrs. Dennison, 'but I
+kept hoping it might stop, and any way, that it might never trouble
+her, and you had put so much in the house, and we needed the money, and
+I didn't know but she might be nervous and think she couldn't come, and
+I didn't want to take a man boarder.'
+
+"'And aside from the money, we were very anxious to have you come, my
+dear,' says Mrs. Bird.
+
+"'Yes,' says Mrs. Dennison, 'we wanted the young company in the house;
+we were lonesome, and we both of us took a great liking to you the
+minute we set eyes on you.'
+
+"And I guess they meant what they said, both of them.  They were
+beautiful women, and nobody could be any kinder to me than they were,
+and I never blamed them for not telling me before, and, as they said,
+there wasn't really much to tell.
+
+"They hadn't any sooner fairly bought the house, and moved into it,
+than they began to see and hear things.  Mrs. Bird said they were
+sitting together in the sitting-room one evening when they heard it the
+first time.  She said her sister was knitting lace (Mrs. Dennison made
+beautiful knitted lace) and she was reading the Missionary Herald (Mrs.
+Bird was very much interested in mission work), when all of a sudden
+they heard something.  She heard it first and she laid down her
+Missionary Herald and listened, and then Mrs. Dennison she saw her
+listening and she drops her lace. 'What is it you are listening to,
+Abby?' says she.  Then it came again and they both heard, and the cold
+shivers went down their backs to hear it, though they didn't know why.
+'It's the cat, isn't it?' says Mrs. Bird.
+
+"'It isn't any cat,' says Mrs. Dennison.
+
+"'Oh, I guess it MUST be the cat; maybe she's got a mouse,' says Mrs.
+Bird, real cheerful, to calm down Mrs. Dennison, for she saw she was
+'most scared to death, and she was always afraid of her fainting away.
+Then she opens the door and calls, 'Kitty, kitty, kitty!'  They had
+brought their cat with them in a basket when they came to East
+Wilmington to live.  It was a real handsome tiger cat, a tommy, and he
+knew a lot.
+
+"Well, she called 'Kitty, kitty, kitty!' and sure enough the kitty
+came, and when he came in the door he gave a big yawl that didn't sound
+unlike what they had heard.
+
+"'There, sister, here he is; you see it was the cat,' says Mrs. Bird.
+'Poor kitty!'
+
+"But Mrs. Dennison she eyed the cat, and she give a great screech.
+
+"'What's that?  What's that?' says she.
+
+"'What's what?' says Mrs. Bird, pretending to herself that she didn't
+see what her sister meant.
+
+"'Somethin's got hold of that cat's tail,' says Mrs. Dennison.
+'Somethin's got hold of his tail.  It's pulled straight out, an' he
+can't get away.  Just hear him yawl!'
+
+"'It isn't anything,' says Mrs. Bird, but even as she said that she
+could see a little hand holding fast to that cat's tail, and then the
+child seemed to sort of clear out of the dimness behind the hand, and
+the child was sort of laughing then, instead of looking sad, and she
+said that was a great deal worse.  She said that laugh was the most
+awful and the saddest thing she ever heard.
+
+"Well, she was so dumfounded that she didn't know what to do, and she
+couldn't sense at first that it was anything supernatural.  She thought
+it must be one of the neighbour's children who had run away and was
+making free of their house, and was teasing their cat, and that they
+must be just nervous to feel so upset by it.  So she speaks up sort of
+sharp.
+
+"'Don't you know that you mustn't pull the kitty's tail?' says she.
+'Don't you know you hurt the poor kitty, and she'll scratch you if you
+don't take care.  Poor kitty, you mustn't hurt her.'
+
+"And with that she said the child stopped pulling that cat's tail and
+went to stroking her just as soft and pitiful, and the cat put his back
+up and rubbed and purred as if he liked it.  The cat never seemed a
+mite afraid, and that seemed queer, for I had always heard that animals
+were dreadfully afraid of ghosts; but then, that was a pretty harmless
+little sort of ghost.
+
+"Well, Mrs. Bird said the child stroked that cat, while she and Mrs.
+Dennison stood watching it, and holding onto each other, for, no matter
+how hard they tried to think it was all right, it didn't look right.
+Finally Mrs. Dennison she spoke.
+
+"'What's your name, little girl?' says she.
+
+"Then the child looks up and stops stroking the cat, and says she can't
+find her mother, just the way she said it to me.  Then Mrs. Dennison
+she gave such a gasp that Mrs. Bird thought she was going to faint
+away, but she didn't.  'Well, who is your mother?' says she.  But the
+child just says again 'I can't find my mother--I can't find my mother.'
+
+"'Where do you live, dear?' says Mrs. Bird.
+
+"'I can't find my mother,' says the child.
+
+"Well, that was the way it was.  Nothing happened.  Those two women
+stood there hanging onto each other, and the child stood in front of
+them, and they asked her questions, and everything she would say was:
+'I can't find my mother.'
+
+"Then Mrs. Bird tried to catch hold of the child, for she thought in
+spite of what she saw that perhaps she was nervous and it was a real
+child, only perhaps not quite right in its head, that had run away in
+her little nightgown after she had been put to bed.
+
+"She tried to catch the child.  She had an idea of putting a shawl
+around it and going out--she was such a little thing she could have
+carried her easy enough--and trying to find out to which of the
+neighbours she belonged.  But the minute she moved toward the child
+there wasn't any child there; there was only that little voice seeming
+to come from nothing, saying 'I can't find my mother,' and presently
+that died away.
+
+"Well, that same thing kept happening, or something very much the same.
+Once in awhile Mrs. Bird would be washing dishes, and all at once the
+child would be standing beside her with the dish-towel, wiping them.
+Of course, that was terrible.  Mrs. Bird would wash the dishes all
+over.  Sometimes she didn't tell Mrs. Dennison, it made her so nervous.
+Sometimes when they were making cake they would find the raisins all
+picked over, and sometimes little sticks of kindling-wood would be
+found laying beside the kitchen stove. They never knew when they would
+come across that child, and always she kept saying over and over that
+she couldn't find her mother. They never tried talking to her, except
+once in awhile Mrs. Bird would get desperate and ask her something, but
+the child never seemed to hear it; she always kept right on saying that
+she couldn't find her mother.
+
+"After they had told me all they had to tell about their experience
+with the child, they told me about the house and the people that had
+lived there before they did.  It seemed something dreadful had happened
+in that house.  And the land agent had never let on to them.  I don't
+think they would have bought it if he had, no matter how cheap it was,
+for even if folks aren't really afraid of anything, they don't want to
+live in houses where such dreadful things have happened that you keep
+thinking about them.  I know after they told me I should never have
+stayed there another night, if I hadn't thought so much of them, no
+matter how comfortable I was made; and I never was nervous, either.
+But I stayed.  Of course, it didn't happen in my room.  If it had I
+could not have stayed."
+
+"What was it?" asked Mrs. Emerson in an awed voice.
+
+"It was an awful thing.  That child had lived in the house with her
+father and mother two years before.  They had come--or the father
+had--from a real good family.  He had a good situation: he was a
+drummer for a big leather house in the city, and they lived real
+pretty, with plenty to do with.  But the mother was a real wicked
+woman.  She was as handsome as a picture, and they said she came from
+good sort of people enough in Boston, but she was bad clean through,
+though she was real pretty spoken and most everybody liked her.  She
+used to dress out and make a great show, and she never seemed to take
+much interest in the child, and folks began to say she wasn't treated
+right.
+
+"The woman had a hard time keeping a girl.  For some reason one
+wouldn't stay.  They would leave and then talk about her awfully,
+telling all kinds of things.  People didn't believe it at first; then
+they began to.  They said that the woman made that little thing, though
+she wasn't much over five years old, and small and babyish for her age,
+do most of the work, what there was done; they said the house used to
+look like a pig-sty when she didn't have help.  They said the little
+thing used to stand on a chair and wash dishes, and they'd seen her
+carrying in sticks of wood most as big as she was many a time, and
+they'd heard her mother scolding her. The woman was a fine singer, and
+had a voice like a screech-owl when she scolded.
+
+"The father was away most of the time, and when that happened he had
+been away out West for some weeks.  There had been a married man
+hanging about the mother for some time, and folks had talked some; but
+they weren't sure there was anything wrong, and he was a man very high
+up, with money, so they kept pretty still for fear he would hear of it
+and make trouble for them, and of course nobody was sure, though folks
+did say afterward that the father of the child had ought to have been
+told.
+
+"But that was very easy to say; it wouldn't have been so easy to find
+anybody who would have been willing to tell him such a thing as that,
+especially when they weren't any too sure.  He set his eyes by his
+wife, too.  They said all he seemed to think of was to earn money to
+buy things to deck her out in.  And he about worshiped the child, too.
+They said he was a real nice man.  The men that are treated so bad
+mostly are real nice men.  I've always noticed that.
+
+"Well, one morning that man that there had been whispers about was
+missing.  He had been gone quite a while, though, before they really
+knew that he was missing, because he had gone away and told his wife
+that he had to go to New York on business and might be gone a week, and
+not to worry if he didn't get home, and not to worry if he didn't
+write, because he should be thinking from day to day that he might take
+the next train home and there would be no use in writing.  So the wife
+waited, and she tried not to worry until it was two days over the week,
+then she run into a neighbour's and fainted dead away on the floor; and
+then they made inquiries and found out that he had skipped--with some
+money that didn't belong to him, too.
+
+"Then folks began to ask where was that woman, and they found out by
+comparing notes that nobody had seen her since the man went away; but
+three or four women remembered that she had told them that she thought
+of taking the child and going to Boston to visit her folks, so when
+they hadn't seen her around, and the house shut, they jumped to the
+conclusion that was where she was.  They were the neighbours that lived
+right around her, but they didn't have much to do with her, and she'd
+gone out of her way to tell them about her Boston plan, and they didn't
+make much reply when she did.
+
+"Well, there was this house shut up, and the man and woman missing and
+the child.  Then all of a sudden one of the women that lived the
+nearest remembered something.  She remembered that she had waked up
+three nights running, thinking she heard a child crying somewhere, and
+once she waked up her husband, but he said it must be the Bisbees'
+little girl, and she thought it must be.  The child wasn't well and was
+always crying.  It used to have colic spells, especially at night.  So
+she didn't think any more about it until this came up, then all of a
+sudden she did think of it.  She told what she had heard, and finally
+folks began to think they had better enter that house and see if there
+was anything wrong.
+
+"Well, they did enter it, and they found that child dead, locked in one
+of the rooms.  (Mrs. Dennison and Mrs. Bird never used that room; it
+was a back bedroom on the second floor.)
+
+"Yes, they found that poor child there, starved to death, and frozen,
+though they weren't sure she had frozen to death, for she was in bed
+with clothes enough to keep her pretty warm when she was alive.  But
+she had been there a week, and she was nothing but skin and bone.  It
+looked as if the mother had locked her into the house when she went
+away, and told her not to make any noise for fear the neighbours would
+hear her and find out that she herself had gone.
+
+"Mrs. Dennison said she couldn't really believe that the woman had
+meant to have her own child starved to death.  Probably she thought the
+little thing would raise somebody, or folks would try to get in the
+house and find her.  Well, whatever she thought, there the child was,
+dead.
+
+"But that wasn't all.  The father came home, right in the midst of it;
+the child was just buried, and he was beside himself.  And--he went on
+the track of his wife, and he found her, and he shot her dead; it was
+in all the papers at the time; then he disappeared. Nothing had been
+seen of him since.  Mrs. Dennison said that she thought he had either
+made way with himself or got out of the country, nobody knew, but they
+did know there was something wrong with the house.
+
+"'I knew folks acted queer when they asked me how I liked it when we
+first came here,' says Mrs. Dennison, 'but I never dreamed why till we
+saw the child that night.'
+
+"I never heard anything like it in my life," said Mrs. Emerson, staring
+at the other woman with awestruck eyes.
+
+"I thought you'd say so," said Mrs. Meserve.  "You don't wonder that I
+ain't disposed to speak light when I hear there is anything queer about
+a house, do you?"
+
+"No, I don't, after that," Mrs. Emerson said.
+
+"But that ain't all," said Mrs. Meserve.
+
+"Did you see it again?" Mrs. Emerson asked.
+
+"Yes, I saw it a number of times before the last time.  It was lucky I
+wasn't nervous, or I never could have stayed there, much as I liked the
+place and much as I thought of those two women; they were beautiful
+women, and no mistake.  I loved those women.  I hope Mrs. Dennison will
+come and see me sometime.
+
+"Well, I stayed, and I never knew when I'd see that child.  I got so I
+was very careful to bring everything of mine upstairs, and not leave
+any little thing in my room that needed doing, for fear she would come
+lugging up my coat or hat or gloves or I'd find things done when
+there'd been no live being in the room to do them.  I can't tell you
+how I dreaded seeing her; and worse than the seeing her was the hearing
+her say, 'I can't find my mother.'  It was enough to make your blood
+run cold.  I never heard a living child cry for its mother that was
+anything so pitiful as that dead one. It was enough to break your heart.
+
+"She used to come and say that to Mrs. Bird oftener than to any one
+else.  Once I heard Mrs. Bird say she wondered if it was possible that
+the poor little thing couldn't really find her mother in the other
+world, she had been such a wicked woman.
+
+"But Mrs. Dennison told her she didn't think she ought to speak so nor
+even think so, and Mrs. Bird said she shouldn't wonder if she was
+right.  Mrs. Bird was always very easy to put in the wrong. She was a
+good woman, and one that couldn't do things enough for other folks.  It
+seemed as if that was what she lived on.  I don't think she was ever so
+scared by that poor little ghost, as much as she pitied it, and she was
+'most heartbroken because she couldn't do anything for it, as she could
+have done for a live child.
+
+"'It seems to me sometimes as if I should die if I can't get that awful
+little white robe off that child and get her in some clothes and feed
+her and stop her looking for her mother,' I heard her say once, and she
+was in earnest.  She cried when she said it.  That wasn't long before
+she died.
+
+"Now I am coming to the strangest part of it all.  Mrs. Bird died very
+sudden.  One morning--it was Saturday, and there wasn't any school--I
+went downstairs to breakfast, and Mrs. Bird wasn't there; there was
+nobody but Mrs. Dennison.  She was pouring out the coffee when I came
+in.  'Why, where's Mrs. Bird?' says I.
+
+"'Abby ain't feeling very well this morning,' says she; 'there isn't
+much the matter, I guess, but she didn't sleep very well, and her head
+aches, and she's sort of chilly, and I told her I thought she'd better
+stay in bed till the house gets warm.'  It was a very cold morning.
+
+"'Maybe she's got cold,' says I.
+
+"'Yes, I guess she has,' says Mrs. Dennison.  'I guess she's got cold.
+She'll be up before long.  Abby ain't one to stay in bed a minute
+longer than she can help.'
+
+"Well, we went on eating our breakfast, and all at once a shadow
+flickered across one wall of the room and over the ceiling the way a
+shadow will sometimes when somebody passes the window outside. Mrs.
+Dennison and I both looked up, then out of the window; then Mrs.
+Dennison she gives a scream.
+
+"'Why, Abby's crazy!' says she.  'There she is out this bitter cold
+morning, and--and--'  She didn't finish, but she meant the child. For
+we were both looking out, and we saw, as plain as we ever saw anything
+in our lives, Mrs. Abby Bird walking off over the white snow-path with
+that child holding fast to her hand, nestling close to her as if she
+had found her own mother.
+
+"'She's dead,' says Mrs. Dennison, clutching hold of me hard. 'She's
+dead; my sister is dead!'
+
+"She was.  We hurried upstairs as fast as we could go, and she was dead
+in her bed, and smiling as if she was dreaming, and one arm and hand
+was stretched out as if something had hold of it; and it couldn't be
+straightened even at the last--it lay out over her casket at the
+funeral."
+
+"Was the child ever seen again?" asked Mrs. Emerson in a shaking voice.
+
+"No," replied Mrs. Meserve; "that child was never seen again after she
+went out of the yard with Mrs. Bird."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other
+Stories of the Supernatural, by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
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