re to find matches in the dining-room, so she
went through the hall, with a sort of mad rush in spite of her
blindness, and she gained the dining-room and felt along the shelf
for a little hammered-brass bowl where matches were usually kept. In
it she felt only two. The mantel-shelf was the old-fashioned marble
monstrosity, the perpetuation of a false taste in domestic
architecture, but it was excellent as to its facilities for
scratching matches. She rubbed one of the two matches under the shelf
on the rough surface, but it did not ignite. It evidently was a
half-burned match. She took the other. It seemed to her that if that
failed her, if she had to grope about the kitchen for more in this
thick blackness--for even the street-light did not reach this
room--she should die. She rubbed the last match against the marble,
and it blazed directly. She shielded it carefully with her hand from
the door draught, and succeeded in lighting a candle in one of a pair
of brass candlesticks which stood on the shelf. She then held the
flaring light aloft and looked fearfully around the room. Everything
was as usual, but, strangely enough, it did not reassure her. The
solitariness continued to hold terrible possibilities for her as well
as the darkness, and with the light also returned what had been for a
few minutes in abeyance before her purely selfish fear, the anxiety
over her father. She moved about the house with the candle, going
from room to room. It seemed to her that she could not remain one
minute if she did not do so. Every time before entering a room she
felt sure that it was occupied. Every time after leaving it she felt
sure that something unknown was left there. She went into the
kitchen, and saw her miserable little dinner drying up in the shelf
of the range, and then for the first time self-pity asserted itself.
She sat down and sobbed and sobbed.

"There, I got that nice dinner, that beautiful dinner," she said to
herself, quite aloud in a pitiful wail like a baby's, "and perhaps
poor papa will never even taste it. Oh dear! Oh dear!"

She rocked herself back and forth in the kitchen-chair, weeping. She
had set the candle on the table, and a draught of wind from some
unknown quarter struck it and the strangest lights and shadows flared
and flickered over the room and ceiling. Presently, Charlotte,
looking at them, became diverted again from her grief. She looked
about fearfully. Then she made a tremendous effort, r