articles of dress. She was a very punctilious woman. She put on
a black India silk dress with purple flowers. She combed her
grayish-blond hair in smooth ridges back from her broad forehead. She
pinned her lace at her throat with a brooch, very handsome, although
somewhat obsolete--a bunch of pearl grapes on black onyx, set in gold
filagree. She had purchased it several years ago with a considerable
portion of the stipend from her spring term of school-teaching.

As she surveyed herself in the little swing mirror surmounting the
old-fashioned mahogany bureau she suddenly bent forward and looked
closely at the brooch. It seemed to her that something was wrong with
it. As she looked she became sure. Instead of the familiar bunch of
pearl grapes on the black onyx, she saw a knot of blonde and black hair
under glass surrounded by a border of twisted gold. She felt a thrill
of horror, though she could not tell why. She unpinned the brooch, and
it was her own familiar one, the pearl grapes and the onyx. "How very
foolish I am," she thought. She thrust the pin in the laces at her
throat and again looked at herself in the glass, and there it was
again--the knot of blond and black hair and the twisted gold.

Louisa Stark looked at her own large, firm face above the brooch and it
was full of terror and dismay which were new to it. She straightway
began to wonder if there could be anything wrong with her mind. She
remembered that an aunt of her mother's had been insane. A sort of
fury with herself possessed her. She stared at the brooch in the glass
with eyes at once angry and terrified. Then she removed it again and
there was her own old brooch. Finally she thrust the gold pin through
the lace again, fastened it and turning a defiant back on the glass,
went down to supper.

At the supper table she met the other boarders--the elderly widow, the
young clergyman and the middle-aged librarian. She viewed the elderly
widow with reserve, the clergyman with respect, the middle-aged
librarian with suspicion. The latter wore a very youthful shirt-waist,
and her hair in a girlish fashion which the school-teacher, who twisted
hers severely from the straining roots at the nape of her neck to the
small, smooth coil at the top, condemned as straining after effects no
longer hers by right.

The librarian, who had a quick acridness of manner, addressed her,
asking what room she had, and asked the second time in spite of the
s