e long swoon
into which she had fallen at sight of the belt, she heard all the story
through without a word, and then she came here, and left the world."

"Came here?" repeated Margaret.

"Here, to these rooms; but what different rooms! She sent for a painter,
and had the walls painted black. She had everything with an atom of
colour in it taken away; and in these black rooms she lived, and in them
she died. She wept so much--partly that, and partly the want of
light--that her eyes became abnormally sensitive, and she could not bear
even to see anything white. As time went on--Margaret, you will hardly
believe this, but it is literally true--she would not even have white
china on her table. She declared it hurt her eyes. So her father, who
could refuse her nothing, sent for a set of dark brown china, and she
ate brown bread on it,--would not look at white bread,--and was served
by a mulatto woman, an old nurse who had been in the family from her
childhood."

"Aunt Faith, can it be--you say it really is true! but--how could they
let her? Why did they not have an oculist?"

"My dear child, oculists did not exist in those days. If she were living
to-day, it would be pronounced a case of nervous exhaustion, and she
would be taken for a sea voyage, or sent to a rest-cure, or treated in
one of the hundred different ways that we know of nowadays. But then,
nobody knew what to do for her, poor lady. To be 'crossed in love,' as
it was called, was a thing that admitted of no cure, unless the patient
were willing to be cured. People spoke of Phoebe Montfort under their
breath, and called her 'a blight,' meaning a person whose life has been
blighted. The world has gone on a good deal in the two generations since
then, my dear Margaret."

"I should think so," said Margaret; "poor soul! And did she have to live
very long, Aunt Faith? I hope not!"

"A good many years, my dear. She must have been an elderly woman when
she died; not old, as I count age, but perhaps seventy-five, or
thereabouts. I lived far away at that time, but John Montfort has often
told me of the time of her death. He was a little lad, and he regarded
the Black Rooms and their tenant with the utmost terror. He used to run
past the door, he says, for fear the Black Aunt should come out and
seize him, and take him into her dreary dwelling. Poor Aunt Phoebe was
the mildest creature in the world, and would not have hurt a fly, but to
him she was something awful,-