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But there was tremendous strength in the woman’s nature. She had inherited strength for good and righteous self-assertion, from the evil strength of her ancestors. They had turned their own weapons against themselves. She made an effort which seemed almost mortal, but was conscious that the hideous thing was gone from her. She thought her own thoughts. Then she scouted to herself the idea of anything supernatural about the terrific experience. “I am imagining everything,” she told herself. She went on with her preparations; she went to the bureau to take down her hair. She looked in the glass and saw, instead of her softly parted waves of hair, harsh lines of iron-gray under the black borders of an old- fashioned head-dress. She saw instead of her smooth, broad forehead, a high one wrinkled with the intensest concentration of selfish reflections of a long life; she saw instead of her steady blue eyes, black ones with depths of malignant reserve, behind a broad meaning of ill will; she saw instead of her firm, benevolent mouth one with a hard, thin line, a network of melancholic wrinkles. She saw instead of her own face, middle-aged and good to see, the expression of a life of honesty and good will to others and patience under trials, the face of a very old woman scowling forever with unceasing hatred and misery at herself and all others, at life, and death, at that which had been and that which was to come. She saw instead of her own face in the glass, the face of her dead Aunt Harriet, topping her own shoulders in her own well- known dress!

Sophia Gill left the room. She went into the one which she shared with her sister Amanda. Amanda looked up and saw her standing there. She had set the lamp on a table, and she stood holding a handkerchief over her face. Amanda looked at her with terror.

“What is it? What is it, Sophia?” she gasped.

Sophia still stood with the handkerchief pressed to her face.

“Oh, Sophia, let me call somebody. Is your face hurt? Sophia, what is the matter with your face?” fairly shrieked Amanda.

Suddenly Sophia took the handkerchief from her face.

“Look at me, Amanda Gill,” she said in an awful voice.

Amanda looked, shrinking.

“What is it? Oh, what is it? You don’t look hurt. What is it, Sophia?”

“What do you see?”

“Why, I see you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. What did you think I would see?”

Sophia Gill looked at her sister. “Never as long as I live will I tell you what I thought you would see, and you must never ask me,” said she.

“Well, I never will, Sophia,” replied Amanda, half weeping with terror.

“You won’t try to sleep in that room again, Sophia?”

“No,” said Sophia; “and I am going to sell this house.”