we have described.

"She has been walking in her sleep, poor little thing," said her mother,
pressing her cold hands in both hers.

Helen knew that this was not the case, and she knew too, that it was
wrong to sanction by her silence an erroneous impression, but she was
afraid of her father's anger if she confessed the truth, afraid that he
would send her back to the dark room and lonely trundle-bed. She
expected that Miss Thusa would call her a foolish child, and tell her
parents all her terrors of the _worm-eaten traveler_, and she raised her
timid eyes to her face, wondering at her silence. There was something in
those prophetic orbs, which she could not read. There seemed to be a
film over them, baffling her penetration, and she looked down with a
long, laboring breath.

Miss Thusa began to feel that her legends might make a deeper impression
than she imagined or intended. She experienced an odd mixture of triumph
and regret--triumph in her power, and regret for its consequences. She
had, too, an instinctive sense that the parents of Helen would be
displeased with her, were they aware of the influence she had exerted,
and deprive her hereafter of the most admiring auditor that ever hung on
her oracular lips. She had _meant_ no harm, but she was really sorry she
had told that "powerful story" at such a late hour, and pressed the
child closer in her arms with a tenderness deepened by self-reproach.

"I suspect Miss Thusa has been telling her some of her awful ghost
stories," said Louis, laughing over the wreck of his slate. "I know what
sent the yellow caterpillar crawling down stairs."

"Crawling!" repeated his father, "I think it was leaping, bouncing, more
like a catamount than a caterpillar."

"I would be ashamed to be a coward and afraid of ghosts," exclaimed
Mittie, with a scornful flash of her bright, black eyes.

"Miss Thusa didn't tell about ghosts," said Helen, bursting into a
passion of tears. This was true, in the _letter_, but not in the
_spirit_--and, young as she was, she knew and felt it, and the wormwood
of remorse gave bitterness to her tears. Never had she felt so wretched,
so humiliated. She had fallen in her own estimation. Her father, brother
and sister had ridiculed her and _called her names_--a terrible thing
for a child. One had called her a _caterpillar_, another a _catamount_,
and a third a _coward_. And added to all this was a sudden and
unutterable horror of the color of yellow, fo