Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/14

4 shaped, close beside the other window, curved over her work like a squirrel with a nut. She had thought much the same bitter thoughts too. For at twenty she had begun to suspect that her girlhood had somehow evaded her, overtaken her and quietly slipped by while she had been watching for it.

As she sat and sewed this afternoon she kept her face steadfastly turned away from the familiar details of the room behind her. It was an ugly room. It was the back-parlor made over into a bedroom for her mother, who couldn't go over the stairs. It was square and high-studded, heavily corniced in dark brown plaster, and in the center of the ceiling there was a rosette, round and ornate, which suggested the summer canna-beds. From it hung a heavy glass chandelier, with six bronze arms, holding up six white frosted globes. In one corner of the room stood the bed—black walnut, solid and substantial, its pillows covered with hand-crocheted shams, red-initialed in the center. Over the bed, suspended from the ceiling and fastened to the floor, appeared an awkward contrivance made of wheels and pulleys and ropes, a sort of derrick for moving the invalid.

The invalid was a yellow and shrunken little creature. Rheumatism had been slowly bending and twisting her for a quarter of a century now. The joints of her fingers curved backwards, and shone as if they had been oiled, where the skin was stretched. But she could still manage a needle. She held it deftly between her thumb and the knuckle of her forefinger.

It was she who next broke the silence of the room. Fifteen long minutes had been ticked off by the onyx clock on the black marble mantel since Aunt Augusta