The room was clean.  There was a rag carpet on the floor; a pine bureau neatly varnished; a half dozen plain but whole chairs; a bedstead, upon which the bedding was scrupulously neat; a pine table, upon which lay a much-thumbed leather-bound family Bible and a few religious books; and between the windows, over the bureau, hung a common engraving of Christ upon the Cross.  The windows themselves looked upon the back of the stores on South Street.  Upon the floor was a large basket full of work, with which the occupant of the room was evidently engaged.  The whole room had an air of severity and cheerlessness, yet it was clear that every thing was most carefully arranged, and continually swept and washed and dusted.

The person who had opened the door was a woman of nearly forty.  She was dressed entirely in black.  She had not so much as a single spot of white any where about her.  She had even a black silk handkerchief twisted about her head in the way that negro women twine gay cloths; and such was her expression that it seemed as if her face, and her heart, and her soul, and all that she felt, or hoped, or remembered, or imagined, were clad and steeped in the same mourning garments and utter gloom.

“Good-morning, Amy,” said she, in a hard and dry, but not unkind voice.  In fact, the rigidity of her aspect, the hardness of her voice, and the singular blackness of her costume, seemed to be too monotonously uniform and resolute not to indicate something willful or unhealthy in the woman’s condition, as if the whole had been rather superinduced than naturally developed.

“Aunt Martha, I have brought you some things that I hope you will find comforting and agreeable.”

The young woman glanced around the desolately regular and forbidding room, and sighed.  The other took the basket and stepped to a closet, but paused as she opened it, and turning to Amy, said, in the same dry, hopeless manner,

“This bounty is too good for a sinner; and yet it would be the unpardonable sin for so great a sinner to end her own life willfully.”

The solemn woman put the contents of the basket into the closet; but it seemed as if, in that gloom, the sugar must have already lost its sweetness and the tea its flavor.

Amy still glanced round the room, and her eyes filled with tears.

“Dear Aunt Martha, when may I tell?” she asked, with piteous earnestness.

“Amy, would you thwart God?  He is too merciful already.  I almost fear that to tolerate your sympathy and kindness is a sore offense in me.  Think what a worm I am!  How utterly foul and rank with sin!”

She spoke with clasped hands lying before her in her lap, in the same hard tone as if the words were cut in ebony; with the same fixed lips—­the same pale, unsmiling severity of face; above which the abundant hair, streaked with early gray, was almost entirely lost in the black handkerchief.

“But surely God is good!” said Amy, tenderly and sadly.  “If we sin, He only asks us to repent and be forgiven.”