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Page 37
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.
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