Julie saw Aunt Sadie flush. The words were an insult to both of them, for though the rooms were Mrs. Johnson’s to rent if she pleased, they were in Julie’s house. Mr. Bixby looked unhappy and apologetic, but incapable of finding any way of relieving the situation. Julie’s exaltation had all evaporated. She was back again in the dreadful constriction of her small self. She had forced a door open for a moment, and looked forth into a wider world roofed by an amazing sky, but only Mr. Bixby would look at it. Now the door was banged shut again. “Well, I must go in and lay off my things,” she said, turning away abruptly. Mrs. Bixby resented Julie’s not having expressed any interest over the possibility of having her for a tenant, and shot a taunt at her as she left. “Oh, how can you bear to leave that beautiful sky, Miss Rose?” she cried. Julie’s momentary flare of spirit was gone. She could find no power to retort, and turned away in silence. As she entered her door, she heard Mrs. Bixby comment to Mrs. Wicket, “Well, she certainly does seem to be a funny little thing.” “If that woman takes those rooms, if she’s right up there over my head all the time, I’ll--I’ll _choke_ to death!” Julie cried to herself. “She just stifles me so I can’t breathe! She stifles him, too.” VII All that Sunday Julie was haunted by the thought of Mr. and Mrs. Bixby’s taking Aunt Sadie’s furnished rooms upstairs. They would all be at very close quarters if they did. Julie kept the store and her three neat little rooms at the back. The other half of the house she rented to Aunt Sadie, who in turn rented out the upstairs floor as a small furnished apartment. Two doors, one upstairs and one down, connected the establishments. The one downstairs opened from Julie’s small hall straight into Aunt Sadie’s sitting-room. The other was at the top of Julie’s flight of stairs and gave on the rooms above. Neither of these doors had ever been locked. Julie and Aunt Sadie were in the habit of running unceremoniously in and out of one another’s quarters by way of the downstairs door, and even the upstairs one Julie had always left unfastened, in case the tenants above desired to come down through her hall and so out to the side street. Julie was seized that afternoon with a panic over that door. She was in her sitting-room, seated by the window with her church paper in her lap. The wind blew fitfully in, bringing her the scent of roses from her little plot. She wanted to go out and work around the bushes, but she did not think that was right on Sunday; so after drifting discreetly about the garden, inspecting each plant and little clump of blossoms, she had retired indoors, and settled herself with the _Sunday Record_, which she subscribed to dutifully, and which she usually held in her lap on Sabbath afternoons, but which she rarely read.