The stairs ascended at the back of the hall, with a cloak-closet under them now stuffed with old coats and hats belonging to the whole family. Opposite this closet the dining-room door opened. All the space in front was devoted to the large front room known as the “parlor.” Cornelia flung the door open wide, and stepped in. The blinds were closed, letting in only a slant ray of light from a broken slat over the desolation of half-unpacked boxes and barrels that prevailed. Evidently the children had mauled everything over in search of certain articles they needed, and had not put back or put away anything. Pictures and dishes and clothing lay about miscellaneously in a confused heap, and a single step into the room was liable to do damage, for one might step into a china meat-platter under an eider-down quilt, or knock over a cut-glass pitcher in the dark. Cornelia stopped, and rescued several of her mother’s best dishes from a row about the first barrel by the door, transferring them to the hall-rack before she dared go in to look around. The piano was still encased in burlap, standing with its keyboard to the wall, an emblem of the family’s desolation. As her eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, Cornelia gradually began to identify various familiar objects. There were the old sofa and upholstered chairs that used to be in the nursery when Louise and Harry were mere babies. The springs were sagging and the tapestry faded. She searched in vain for the better suite of furniture that had been bought for the living room before she went to college. Where was it? It hadn’t been in the dining-room the night before, she was sure; and of course it couldn’t be in the kitchen. Could there be a shed at the back somewhere, with more things that were not as yet unpacked? With a growing fear she slipped behind some barrels, and tried to find the big bookcase with the glass doors, and the mahogany tables that mother had been so proud of because they had belonged to her great-grandmother, and the claw-legged desk with the cabinet on the top. Not one of them was to be found. A horrible suspicion was dawning in her mind. She waited only to turn back the corners of several rolls of carpet and rugs, and make sure the Oriental rugs were missing, before she fled in a panic to the back of the house. Through the bare little kitchen she passed without even noticing how hard the children had worked to clear it up. Perhaps she would not have called it cleared up, her standard being on an entirely different scale from theirs. Yes, there was a door at the farther side. She flung it open, and found the hoped-for shed, but no furniture. Its meagre space was choked with tubs and an old washing-machine, broken boxes and barrel-staves, a marble table-top broken in two, and a rusty wash-boiler. With a shiver of conviction she stood and stared at them, and then slammed the door shut, and, flinging herself into a kitchen chair, burst into tears.