brary was meagre and uninteresting, Hepsey was busy in the
kitchen, and Ruth was frankly bored. Reduced at last to the desperate
strait of putting all her belongings in irreproachable order, she found
herself, at four o'clock, without occupation. The temptation in the
attic wrestled strongly with her, but she would not go.

It seemed an age until six o'clock. "This won't do," she said to
herself; "I'll have to learn how to sew, or crochet, or make tatting. At
last, I am to be domesticated. I used to wonder how women had time for
the endless fancy work, but I see, now."

She was accustomed to self analysis and introspection, and began to
consider what she could get out of the next six months in the way of
gain. Physical strength, certainly, but what else? The prospect was
gloomy just then.

"It's goin' to rain, Miss Thorne," said Hepsey, at the door. "Is all the
winders shut?"

"Yes, I think so," she answered.

"Supper's ready any time you want it."

"Very well, I will come now."

When she sat down in the parlour, after doing scant justice to Hepsey's
cooking, it was with a grim resignation, of the Puritan sort which,
supposedly, went with the house. There was but one place in all the
world where she would like to be, and she was afraid to trust herself in
the attic.

By an elaborate mental process, she convinced herself that the cedar
chest and the old trunks did not concern her in the least, and tried to
develop a feminine fear of mice, which was not natural to her. She
had just placed herself loftily above all mundane things, when Hepsey
marched into the room, and placed the attic lamp, newly filled, upon the
marble table.

Here was a manifest duty confronting a very superior person and, as she
went upstairs, she determined to come back immediately, but when she had
put the light in the seaward window, she lingered, under the spell of
the room.

The rain beat steadily upon the roof and dripped from the eaves. The
light made distorted shadows upon the wall and floor, while the bunches
of herbs, hanging from the rafters, swung lightly back and forth when
the wind rattled the windows and shook the old house.

The room seemed peopled by the previous generation, that had slept in
the massive mahogany bed, rocked in the chairs, with sewing or gossip,
and stood before the old dresser on tiptoe, peering eagerly into the
mirror which probably had hung above it. It was as if Memory sat at the
spinning-wheel, idly