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“Well, you must have been having a good time playing up-stairs,” Jane Foster said when she entered the big kitchen. “This is going to do you good, Judy. Looks like she’d had a day in the country, don’t she, Jem?”

Through the weeks that followed her habit of “playing up-stairs” was accepted as a perfectly natural thing. No questions were asked and she knew it was not necessary to enter into any explanations.

Every day she went to the door of the Closed Room and, finding it closed, at a touch of her hand upon the panel it swung softly open. There she waited–sometimes for a longer sometimes for a shorter time–and the child with the coppery hair came to her. The world below was gone as soon as she entered the room, and through the hours they played together joyously as happy children play. But in their playing it was always Judith who touched the toys–who held the doll—who set the little table for their feast. Once as she went down-stairs she remembered that when she had that day made a wreath of roses from the roof and had gone to put it on her playmate’s head, she had drawn back with deepened dimple and, holding up her hand, had said, laughing: “No. Do not touch me.”

But there was no mystery in it after all. Judith knew she should presently understand.

She was so happy that her happiness lived in her face in a sort of delicate brilliance. Jane Foster observed the change in her with exceeding comfort, her view being that spacious quarters, fresh air, and sounder sleep had done great things for her.

“Them big eyes of hers ain’t like no other child’s eyes I’ve ever seen,” she said to her husband with cheerful self-gratulation. “An’ her skin’s that fine an’ thin an’ fair you can jest see through it. She always looks to me as if she was made out of different stuff from me an’ you, Jem. I’ve always said it.”

“She’s going to make a corking handsome girl,” responded Jem with a chuckle.

They had been in the house two months, when one afternoon, as she was slicing potatoes for supper, Jane looked round to see the child standing at the kitchen doorway, looking with a puzzled expression at some wilted flowers she held in her hand. Jane’s impression was that she had been coming into the room and had stopped suddenly to look at what she held.

“What’ve you got there, Judy?” she asked.

“They’re flowers,” said Judith, her eyes still more puzzled.

“Where’d you get ’em from? I didn’t know you’d been out. I thought you was up-stairs.”

“I was,” said Judith quite simply. “In the Closed Room.”

Jane Foster’s knife dropped into her pan with a splash.

“Well,” she gasped.

Judith looked at her with quiet eyes.

“The Closed Room!” Jane cried out. “What are you saying? You couldn’t get in?”

“Yes, I can.”

Jane was conscious of experiencing a shock. She said afterwards that suddenly something gave her the creeps.

“You couldn’t open the door,” she persisted. “I tried it again yesterday as I passed by–turned the handle and gave it a regular shove and it wouldn’t give an inch.”

“Yes,” the child answered; “I heard you. We were inside then.”

A few days later, when Jane weepingly related the incident to awe-stricken and sympathizing friends, she described as graphically as her limited vocabulary would allow her to do so, the look in Judith’s face as she came nearer to her.

“Don’t tell me there was nothing happening then,” she said. “She just came up to me with them dead flowers in her hand an’ a kind of look in her eyes as if she was half sorry for me an’ didn’t know quite why.

“‘The door opens for me,’ she says. ‘That’s where I play every day. There’s a little girl comes and plays with me. She comes in at the window, I think. She is like the picture in the room where the books are. Her hair hangs down and she has a dimple near her mouth.’