n from London furnishings and workmen
to set her own apartments and Anne's in order. But she would not occupy
the rooms she had lived in heretofore. For some reason it seemed to be
her whim to have begun to have an enmity for them. The first day she
entered them with Anne she stopped upon the threshold.

"I will not stay here," she said. "I never loved the rooms--and now I
hate them. It seems to me it was another woman who lived in them--in
another world. 'Tis so long ago that 'tis ghostly. Make ready the old
red chambers for me," to her woman; "I will live there. They have been
long closed, and are worm-eaten and mouldy perchance; but a great fire
will warm them. And I will have furnishings from London to make them fit
for habitation."

The next day it seemed for a brief space as if she would have changed
even from the red chambers.

"I did not know," she said, turning with a sudden movement from a side
window, "that one might see the old rose garden from here. I would not
have taken the room had I guessed it. It is too dreary a wilderness,
with its tangle of briars and its broken sun-dial."

"You cannot see the dial from here," said Anne, coming towards her with a
strange paleness and haste. "One cannot see _within_ the garden from any
window, surely."

"Nay," said Clorinda; "'tis not near enough, and the hedges are too high;
but one knows 'tis there, and 'tis tiresome."

"Let us draw the curtains and not look, and forget it," said poor Anne.
And she drew the draperies with a trembling hand; and ever after while
they dwelt in the room they stayed so.

My lady wore her mourning for more than a year, and in her sombre
trailing weeds was a wonder to behold. She lived in her father's house,
and saw no company, but sat or walked and drove with her sister Anne, and
visited the poor. The perfect stateliness of her decorum was more talked
about than any levity would have been; those who were wont to gossip
expecting that having made her fine match and been so soon rid of her
lord, she would begin to show her strange wild breeding again, and
indulge in fantastical whims. That she should wear her mourning with
unflinching dignity and withdraw from the world as strictly as if she had
been a lady of royal blood mourning her prince, was the unexpected thing,
and so was talked of everywhere.

At the end of the eighteenth month she sent one day for Anne, who, coming
at her bidding, found her standing in her c