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“She is not subject to fainting spells,” replied Sophia, but she followed Amanda.

She found her in the room which they occupied together, lying on the bed, very pale and gasping. She leaned over her.

“Amanda, what is the matter; don’t you feel well?” she asked.

“I feel a little faint.”

Sophia got a camphor bottle and began rubbing her sister’s forehead.

“Do you feel better?” she said.

Amanda nodded.

“I guess it was that green apple pie you ate this noon,” said Sophia. “I declare, what did I do with that dress of Aunt Harriet’s? I guess if you feel better I’ll just run and get it and take it up garret. I’ll stop in here again when I come down. You’d better lay still. Flora can bring you up a cup of tea. I wouldn’t try to eat any supper.”

Sophia’s tone as she left the room was full of loving concern. Presently she returned; she looked disturbed, but angrily so. There was not the slightest hint of any fear in her expression.

“I want to know,” said she, looking sharply and quickly around, “if I brought that purple dress in here, after all?”

“I didn’t see you,” replied Amanda.

“I must have. It isn’t in that chamber, nor the closet. You aren’t lying on it, are you?”

“I lay down before you came in,” replied Amanda.

“So you did. Well, I’ll go and look again.”

Presently Amanda heard her sister’s heavy step on the garret stairs. Then she returned with a queer defiant expression on her face.

“I carried it up garret, after all, and put it in the trunk,” said, she. “I declare, I forgot it. I suppose your being faint sort of put it out of my head. There it was, folded up just as nice, right where I put it.”

Sophia’s mouth was set; her eyes upon her sister’s scared, agitated face were full of hard challenge.

“Yes,” murmured Amanda.

“I must go right down and see to that cake,” said Sophia, going out of the room. “If you don’t feel well, you pound on the floor with the umbrella.”

Amanda looked after her. She knew that Sophia had not put that purple dress of her dead Aunt Harriet in the trunk in the garret.

Meantime Miss Louisa Stark was settling herself in the southwest chamber. She unpacked her trunk and hung her dresses carefully in the closet. She filled the bureau drawers’ with nicely folded linen and small 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.