A noise in the hall made her turn, and, looking up, she saw the gaunt
figure of Miss Amelia Peterborough standing in the bend of the
staircase. In her hand the old maid held a twisted candlestick of
greenish brass, and the yellow flame of the candle cast a trembling,
fantastic shadow on the wall at her back. Her head, shorn of the false
"front" she wore in the day, appeared to have become all forehead and
beaked nose; her eyes had dwindled to mere points of blackness; her
mouth, sunken and drawn over toothless gums, was like the mouth of a
witch. The wind, blowing in gusts through the open door, inflated her
gray shawl and the skirt of her dressing-gown, while, with each flutter
of her garments, the grotesque shadow on the white wall danced and
gibbered behind her. And, as she gazed down on the girl, it was as if
the end of life, with its pathos, its cruelties, its bitterness and its
disillusionment, had stopped for a fleeting instant to look back at life
in the pride and ignorance of its beginning.

"There was so much moving about, I thought something might have
happened," said Miss Amelia apologetically, while Gabriella, closing the
door, shut the draught from the staircase.

"Jane had one of her heart attacks," answered the girl. "I'm so sorry we
waked you."

But she was thinking while she spoke, "So that is old age--so that is
what it means to be old?" There is a vague compassion in the thought,
but it held no terror, for the decay of Miss Amelia seemed as utterly
remote and detached from her own life as one of the past ages in
history. The youth in her brain created a radiant illusion of
immortality. By no stretch of imagination could she picture herself like
the infirm and loveless creature before her. Yet she knew, without