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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Stories Of The Supernatural by Wilkins
+and
+THE WIND IN THE ROSE-BUSH
+
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+Stories Of The Supernatural
+and
+THE WIND IN THE ROSE-BUSH
+
+by Mary Wilkins
+
+January, 1999  [Etext #1617]
+[Date last updated: June 6, 2005]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etext of Stories Of The Supernatural by Wilkins
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+
+
+
+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 Lippineott 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 Project Gutenberg Etext of Stories Of The Supernatural by Wilkins
+
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