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“What are you staring at nothing in that queer way for?” demanded Aunt Elizabeth, suddenly returning.

Emily shrank into herself. She couldn’t explain to Aunt Elizabeth—Aunt Elizabeth would be like Ellen Greene and say she was “crazy.”

“I—I wasn’t staring at nothing.”

“Don’t contradict. I say you were,” retorted Aunt Elizabeth. “Don’t do it again. It gives your face an unnatural expression. Come now—we will go upstairs. You are to sleep with me.”

Emily gave a gasp of dismay. She had hoped it might be with Aunt Laura. Sleeping with Aunt Elizabeth seemed a very formidable thing. But she dared not protest. They went up to Aunt Elizabeth’s big, sombre bedroom where there was dark, grim wallpaper that could never be transformed into a fairy curtain, a high black bureau, topped with a tiny swing-mirror, so far above her that there could be no Emily-in-the-glass, tightly closed windows with dark-green curtains, a high bedstead with a dark-green canopy, and a huge, fat, smothering feather-bed, with high, hard pillows.