n, but she had been
so long accustomed to the darkness and gloom of a prison cell, that this
illuminated space seemed broad as the universe to her.

After her clothes were dry, the old woman lighted her candle and began
to examine the house. The parlor was almost empty, and a gust of wind
took her candle as she opened the door, flaring back the flame into her
face. The wind came from a broken pane of glass in the oriel window,
through which a branch of ivy, and the long tendril of a Virginia
creeper had penetrated, and woven themselves in a garland along the
wall. A wren had followed the creeping greenness and built her nest in
the cornice, from which she flew frightened, when a light entered the
room.

The old woman went out disappointed. The thing she sought was not there;
perhaps it had been utterly destroyed. The man who had promised to keep
it sacred, lay sleeping up yonder in the graveyard. How could she expect
strangers to take up his trust? But if the object she sought could not
be found, what was the use of liberty to her. The one aim of her life
would be extinguished. She took up the candle and mounted a flight of
narrow stairs which led to the chambers.

They were all empty except one small room, where she found an iron
bedstead, on which some old quilts and refuse blankets were heaped.
Behind this bed, pressed into a corner, was an old chair, covered with
dust.

When she saw this, the light shook in her hand. She sat down upon the
bedstead, and reaching the candle out, examined the old chair, through
its veil of cobwebs. It was the same. How well she remembered that night
when her own hands had put on that green cover.

The chair was broken. One of its castors dropped to the floor as Mrs.
Yates drew it from the corner, and the carved wood-work came off in her
hand; the cushion was stained and torn in places, but this dilapidation
she knew had not reached her secret.

She took the chair in her arms and carried it down to the kitchen. Some
of the brass nails dropped loose on the stairs, but she took no heed of
them. All she wanted was some instrument with which she could turn the
ricketty thing into a complete wreck. In the drawer of a broken kitchen
table she found an old knife, with the blade half ground away. This she
whetted to an edge on the hearth, and directly the little brass nails
flew right and left, a mass of twisted fringe lay on the hearth, when
the old woman stood in a cloud of dust, holdi