avily down the back stairs on her way to the kitchen.

"It seems to me you had better open the bed while you air and dust,
then make it up again," she called back.

"Yes, sister," Amanda answered, shudderingly.

Nobody knew how this elderly woman with the untrammeled imagination of
a child dreaded to enter the southwest chamber, and yet she could not
have told why she had the dread. She had entered and occupied rooms
which had been once tenanted by persons now dead. The room which had
been hers in the little house in which she and her sister had lived
before coming here had been her dead mother's. She had never reflected
upon the fact with anything but loving awe and reverence. There had
never been any fear. But this was different. She entered and her
heart beat thickly in her ears. Her hands were cold. The room was a
very large one. The four windows, two facing south, two west, were
closed, the blinds also. The room was in a film of green gloom. The
furniture loomed out vaguely. The gilt frame of a blurred old
engraving on the wall caught a little light. The white counterpane on
the bed showed like a blank page.

Amanda crossed the room, opened with a straining motion of her thin
back and shoulders one of the west windows, and threw back the blind.
Then the room revealed itself an apartment full of an aged and worn but
no less valid state. Pieces of old mahogany swelled forth; a
peacock-patterned chintz draped the bedstead. This chintz also covered
a great easy chair which had been the favourite seat of the former
occupant of the room. The closet door stood ajar. Amanda noticed that
with wonder. There was a glimpse of purple drapery floating from a peg
inside the closet. Amanda went across and took down the garment
hanging there. She wondered how her sister had happened to leave it
when she cleaned the room. It was an old loose gown which had belonged
to her aunt. She took it down, shuddering, and closed the closet door
after a fearful glance into its dark depths. It was a long closet with
a strong odour of lovage. The Aunt Harriet had had a habit of eating
lovage and had carried it constantly in her pocket. There was very
likely some of the pleasant root in the pocket of the musty purple gown
which Amanda threw over the easy chair.

Amanda perceived the odour with a start as if before an actual
presence. Odour seems in a sense a vital part of a personality. It can
survive the flesh to which i