This woman’s figure, outlined against the lowered blind, was that of a witch, the shoulders being curved almost in an hump and the emaciated profile resembling the terrible nutcracker contour commonly associated with the broomstick. Her dark hair, streaked with yellowish grey, was strained back from her yellow face into a tight little wad on the back of her head. Her lips were colourless, her cheeks appallingly hollow. Her sunken eyes, set in deep, greenish cavities, burned fiercely beneath her frowning brow. She looked as old and ugly as a sybil and to Anna as wicked. It was she who first recovered sufficiently to speak. “Who are you and WHAT are you doing in my room?” she demanded in a voice that made the girl say to herself ‘Hark from the tomb!’ and gain thereby a bit of audacity. “I’m the other Miller girl, Rusty’s sister,” she faltered. “I just thought--I’d come----” But she could not go on. “Are you mad? Are you stark, staring crazy?” challenged the old woman whom Anna couldn’t believe to be the minister’s wife. As she spoke, large gaps on either side of her front teeth explained the unnatural hollows in her cheeks. “N-no, I guess not. I’m only--sort of _fresh_,” the girl gasped. “Did Bell let you in?”--still more fiercely. “O no, I let myself in,” Anna returned, and as the fierce dark eyes bored into her she seemed forced to confess the whole enormity of her action as if she had been a naughty child. “I poked my finger in and made a hole in the screen, but I don’t believe it’ll matter--it’s so late,--the season, I mean.” “If you are not crazy, what do you mean by breaking into people’s houses and disturbing the sick?” demanded the old woman. “Don’t you know that I haven’t seen anyone except the doctor for twenty-three years?” “Twenty-three--that’s _skidoo_,” murmured Anna under her breath and caught another bit of spirit. Withdrawing her gaze, not without difficulty, from the face before her, she glanced about her, half fearfully, half boldly. A marble-topped table next the chair in which the invalid huddled was covered with bottles, apothecaries’ boxes and medicine glasses. In their midst, a photograph in a velvet frame stood upright by means of a support at the back. As the girl’s eye encountered this, on a sudden she knew it was the little lamb, and her fear took wings. Quite bold now, she went straight up to Mrs. Langley, held out her hand--which was ignored--and smiled ingratiatingly. “The little marble lamb up in the cemetery,” she murmured softly, “I went to see it. I thought you would like to know--that is, I thought you would want to know that it’s all turned black and yellow and mildewed, and----” “What!” the woman almost shrieked. “The little lamb--the cunning little marble lamb on Ella May’s grave with its little legs tucked under it like a baby kitten,--it’s all black and--slimy!” Mrs. Langley fell back among the cushions.