knew the well-remembered way, and she came quickly to the
top.

There were two great rooms running the whole length of the house: the
first was a lumber-room, the second her own especial cell. Cell-like it
was, in its monastic or conventual bareness. It was vague with bareness:
a huge, square room, gaunt as a barn, the walls and ceiling whitewashed,
the floor plain boards. Yonder, near the one small window, stood a table
and tall-backed oaken chair, afar off, as it were, from the doorway--a
journey to them across the creaking floor. On one side an old four-post
bedstead of dark oak, much damaged, was placed by the wall; the sacking
hung down in a loop, torn and decayed--a bedstead on which no one had
slept these hundred years past. By the table there was, too, an ancient
carved linen-press of black oak, Amaryllis' bookcase.

These bits of rude furniture were lost in the vastness of space, as much
as if you had thrown your hat into the sky.

Amaryllis went straight to the window and knelt down. She brought a
handful of violets, fresh-gathered, to place in the glass which she kept
there for her flowers. The window was cut in the thick wall, and formed
a niche, where she always had a tumbler ready--a common glass tumbler,
she could not afford a vase.

They were the white wild violets, the sweetest of all, gathered while
the nightingale was singing his morning song in the April sunshine--a
song the world never listens to, more delicious than his evening notes,
for the sunlight helps him, and the blue of the heavens, the green
leaf, and the soft wind--all the soul of spring.

White wild violets, a dewdrop as it were of flower, tender and delicate,
growing under the great hawthorn hedge, by the mosses and among the dry,
brown leaves of last year, easily overlooked unless you know exactly
where to go for them. She had a bunch for her neck, and a large bunch
for her niche. They would have sunk and fallen into the glass, but she
hung them by their chins over the edge of the tumbler, with their stalks
in the water. Then she sat down in the old chair at the table, and
rested her head on her hand.

Except where she did this every day, and so brushed it, a thin layer of
dust had covered the surface (there was no cloth) and had collected on
her portfolio, thrust aside and neglected. Dust on the indiarubber, dust
on the cake of Indian ink, dust invisible on the smooth surface of the
pencils, dust in the little box of vine charc