“Well, I suppose I am silly to think of it, and she had better go in there,” said Amanda.

“I know she had.  The northeast room is small and hot, and she’s stout and likely to feel the heat, and she’s saved money and is able to board out summers, and maybe she’ll come here another year if she’s well accommodated,” said Sophia.  “Now I guess you’d better go in there and see if any dust has settled on anything since it was cleaned, and open the west windows and let the sun in, while I see to that cake.”

Amanda went to her task in the southwest chamber while her sister stepped heavily down the back stairs on her way to the kitchen.

“It seems to me you had better open the bed while you air and dust, then make it up again,” she called back.

“Yes, sister,” Amanda answered, shudderingly.

Nobody knew how this elderly woman with the untrammeled imagination of a child dreaded to enter the southwest chamber, and yet she could not have told why she had the dread.  She had entered and occupied rooms which had been once tenanted by persons now dead.  The room which had been hers in the little house in which she and her sister had lived before coming here had been her dead mother’s.  She had never reflected upon the fact with anything but loving awe and reverence.  There had never been any fear.  But this was different.  She entered and her heart beat thickly in her ears.  Her hands were cold.  The room was a very large one.  The four windows, two facing south, two west, were closed, the blinds also.  The room was in a film of green gloom.  The furniture loomed out vaguely.  The gilt frame of a blurred old engraving on the wall caught a little light.  The white counterpane on the bed showed like a blank page.

Amanda crossed the room, opened with a straining motion of her thin back and shoulders one of the west windows, and threw back the blind.  Then the room revealed itself an apartment full of an aged and worn but no less valid state.  Pieces of old mahogany swelled forth; a peacock-patterned chintz draped the bedstead.  This chintz also covered a great easy chair which had been the favourite seat of the former occupant of the room.  The closet door stood ajar.  Amanda noticed that with wonder.  There was a glimpse of purple drapery floating from a peg inside the closet.  Amanda went across and took down the garment hanging there.  She wondered how her sister had happened to leave it when she cleaned the room.  It was an old loose gown which had belonged to her aunt.  She took it down, shuddering, and closed the closet door after a fearful glance into its dark depths.  It was a long closet with a strong odour of lovage.  The Aunt Harriet had had a habit of eating lovage and had carried it constantly in her pocket.  There was very likely some of the pleasant root in the pocket of the musty purple gown which Amanda threw over the easy chair.