genuinely distressed as well as
surprised at this strange exhibition, that she would have set down the
portrait to run to Mrs. Muir's succour if at that moment the stillness
of the garret had not been wakened by the tap, tap of a stick. Somebody
was coming up the stairs, hobbling, limping, yet hurrying with
extraordinary energy.

There was only one person in the house, or maybe in the world, whose
coming made that noise, that mingled hobble, rush, and tap: Grandma.

Barrie and Mrs. Muir continued to stare at one another, but their
expression had changed. The approach of a danger to be shared in common
had made the enemies friends. "This is going to be awful. What shall we
do?" the old eyes said to the young and the young eyes said to the old.
Mrs. Muir had forgotten her burning wish and intention to scold Miss
Barribel; nevertheless, the housekeeper was not to be trusted as an
ally. Under the lash of Mrs. MacDonald's tongue she would defend
herself, and Barrie would go to the wall. But the spirit of the martyr
was in the girl, and when the first dread thrill of the tap, tap on the
garret stairs had subsided in her nerves, she remembered her wrongs and
her mother's wrongs, and was not afraid of Grandma. She girded herself
for war.

The tapping came nearer. Mrs. MacDonald was grievously crippled with
rheumatism. Only a strong incentive could have urged her up the steep
straight stairway, with its high steps; but Grandma was indomitable.
Lurching like a ship in a heavy sea, she swept round the corner and
brought herself to anchor by planting her stick with a crash on the wavy
oak floor. There she stood, the grim and hard old craft that had
weathered a hundred storms and refused to be dismayed by any. She must
have been alarmed by the housekeeper's scream and the crash of falling
furniture, and the figure in the coral satin dress was at least as
startling for her as for her old servant; but she gave no cry, and her
face looked as it always looked, hard, and stern, and passionless, as
her gray eyes travelled from granddaughter to housekeeper, from
housekeeper to granddaughter.

"What is the meaning of this?" she inquired in her worst voice, which
Barrie always thought like the turning of a key in an unoiled lock.

"This, ma'am?" quavered Mrs. Muir, unused to the pangs of guilty fear,
and bitterly ashamed of them. "Why, I'd been up here getting some more
moth-balls out of the chemist's store-box, and while I was gone Mis