Page:Emma Speed Sampson--The shorn lamb.djvu/323

Rh search of Aunt Peachy. He had been sure that he had seen a light in the attic, and with a lamp in hand he mounted the stairs to the second floor. He saw the door to the attic stairs was open. The strong odor of the varnish remover filled the hall. This puzzled him.

"Philip, wait for me!" called Elizabeth. "Your father is all right now."

They found old Aunt Peachy lying at the foot of the steps dressed in her fantastic regalia. Philip almost stepped on her. He drew back with an exclamation of horror.

"I think she is dead, Mother," he whispered. "She must have fallen down the steps."

Aunt Peachy had dried up to the mere semblance of a human being. Her head, with its band of feathers, was twisted under her poor old body. The strings of beads had some of them burst and the stairs were strewn with bones and bits of colored glass and buttons. The bottle of varnish remover had broken and the pungent mixture had made a pool all around her.

"Don't touch her, my boy! Don't touch her!" Elizabeth commanded. "You must get the coroner! You must, I say! Too many times have I thought of killing her, and now that she is dead some one may try to prove I have killed her, I or you. God knows that I have wished