‘Ended!’ said she. ‘How ended?’ And somehow her voice sounded to her as her mother’s voice had when she stood there and questioned her sisters about the little room. She seemed to have to drag her words out. She spoke slowly: ‘It seems to me to have only just begun in my case. It was just so with mother when she--’ ‘I really wish, Margaret, you would let it drop. I don’t like to hear you speak of your mother in connection with it. It--’ He hesitated, for was not this their wedding-day? ‘It doesn’t seem quite the thing, quite delicate, you know, to use her name in the matter.’ She saw it all now: _he didn’t believe her_. She felt a chill sense of withering under his glance. ‘Come,’ he added, ‘let us go out, or into the dining-room, somewhere, anywhere, only drop this nonsense.’ He went out; he did not take her hand now--he was vexed, baffled, hurt. Had he not given her his sympathy, his attention, his belief--and his hand?--and she was fooling him. What did it mean?--she so truthful, so free from morbidness--a thing he hated. He walked up and down under the poplars, trying to get into the mood to go and join her in the house. Margaret heard him go out; then she turned and shook the shelves; she reached her hand behind them and tried to push the boards away; she ran out of the house on to the north side and tried to find in the darkness, with her hands, a door, or some steps leading to one. She tore her dress on the old rose-trees, she fell and rose and stumbled, then she sat down on the ground and tried to think. What could she think--was she dreaming? She went into the house and out into the kitchen, and begged Aunt Maria to tell her about the little room--what had become of it, when had they built the closet, when had they bought the gilt-edged china? They went on washing dishes and drying them on the spotless towels with methodical exactness; and as they worked they said that there had never been any little room, so far as they knew; the china-closet had always been there, and the gilt-edged china had belonged to their mother, it had always been in the house. ‘No, I don’t remember that your mother ever asked about any little room,’ said Hannah. ‘She didn’t seem very well that summer, but she never asked about any changes in the house; there hadn’t ever been any changes.’ There it was again: not a sign of interest, curiosity, or annoyance, not a spark of memory. She went out to Hiram. He was telling Mr. Grant about the farm. She had meant to ask him about the room, but her lips were sealed before her husband. Months afterwards, when time had lessened the sharpness of their feelings, they learned to speculate reasonably about the phenomenon, which Mr. Grant had accepted as something not to be scoffed away, not to be treated as a poor joke, but to be put aside as something inexplicable on any ordinary theory.