"Here, to these rooms; but what different rooms! She sent for a painter, and had the walls painted black. She had everything with an atom of colour in it taken away; and in these black rooms she lived, and in them she died. She wept so much--partly that, and partly the want of light--that her eyes became abnormally sensitive, and she could not bear even to see anything white. As time went on--Margaret, you will hardly believe this, but it is literally true--she would not even have white china on her table. She declared it hurt her eyes. So her father, who could refuse her nothing, sent for a set of dark brown china, and she ate brown bread on it,--would not look at white bread,--and was served by a mulatto woman, an old nurse who had been in the family from her childhood." "Aunt Faith, can it be--you say it really is true! but--how could they let her? Why did they not have an oculist?" "My dear child, oculists did not exist in those days. If she were living to-day, it would be pronounced a case of nervous exhaustion, and she would be taken for a sea voyage, or sent to a rest-cure, or treated in one of the hundred different ways that we know of nowadays. But then, nobody knew what to do for her, poor lady. To be 'crossed in love,' as it was called, was a thing that admitted of no cure, unless the patient were willing to be cured. People spoke of Phoebe Montfort under their breath, and called her 'a blight,' meaning a person whose life has been blighted. The world has gone on a good deal in the two generations since then, my dear Margaret." "I should think so," said Margaret; "poor soul! And did she have to live very long, Aunt Faith? I hope not!" "A good many years, my dear. She must have been an elderly woman when she died; not old, as I count age, but perhaps seventy-five, or thereabouts. I lived far away at that time, but John Montfort has often told me of the time of her death. He was a little lad, and he regarded the Black Rooms and their tenant with the utmost terror. He used to run past the door, he says, for fear the Black Aunt should come out and seize him, and take him into her dreary dwelling. Poor Aunt Phoebe was the mildest creature in the world, and would not have hurt a fly, but to him she was something awful,--out of nature. He was taken in to see her once or twice a year, and he always had nightmare after it, being a nervous child. Well, one day he was running through the Green Parlour here, and looking back at the windows of the Black Rooms, as he never could help doing; and he saw Rosalie, the coloured woman, come to the window and throw it wide open, letting in the full light of day. Then she went to the next, and so on; and the child knew what had happened before she spoke. I remember her words: "'She's gone, honey! Her sperit's gone. It went out'n dis window, straight by whar you's standin', and into the cedar bush. De Lord hab mercy!'