The Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Megapack. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

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