Meantime Miss Louisa Stark was settling herself in the southwest chamber.  She unpacked her trunk and hung her dresses carefully in the closet.  She filled the bureau drawers with nicely folded linen and small articles of dress.  She was a very punctilious woman.  She put on a black India silk dress with purple flowers.  She combed her grayish-blond hair in smooth ridges back from her broad forehead.  She pinned her lace at her throat with a brooch, very handsome, although somewhat obsolete—­a bunch of pearl grapes on black onyx, set in gold filagree.  She had purchased it several years ago with a considerable portion of the stipend from her spring term of school-teaching.

As she surveyed herself in the little swing mirror surmounting the old-fashioned mahogany bureau she suddenly bent forward and looked closely at the brooch.  It seemed to her that something was wrong with it.  As she looked she became sure.  Instead of the familiar bunch of pearl grapes on the black onyx, she saw a knot of blonde and black hair under glass surrounded by a border of twisted gold.  She felt a thrill of horror, though she could not tell why.  She unpinned the brooch, and it was her own familiar one, the pearl grapes and the onyx.  “How very foolish I am,” she thought.  She thrust the pin in the laces at her throat and again looked at herself in the glass, and there it was again—­the knot of blond and black hair and the twisted gold.

Louisa Stark looked at her own large, firm face above the brooch and it was full of terror and dismay which were new to it.  She straightway began to wonder if there could be anything wrong with her mind.  She remembered that an aunt of her mother’s had been insane.  A sort of fury with herself possessed her.  She stared at the brooch in the glass with eyes at once angry and terrified.  Then she removed it again and there was her own old brooch.  Finally she thrust the gold pin through the lace again, fastened it and turning a defiant back on the glass, went down to supper.

At the supper table she met the other boarders—­the elderly widow, the young clergyman and the middle-aged librarian.  She viewed the elderly widow with reserve, the clergyman with respect, the middle-aged librarian with suspicion.  The latter wore a very youthful shirt-waist, and her hair in a girlish fashion which the school-teacher, who twisted hers severely from the straining roots at the nape of her neck to the small, smooth coil at the top, condemned as straining after effects no longer hers by right.

The librarian, who had a quick acridness of manner, addressed her, asking what room she had, and asked the second time in spite of the school-teacher’s evident reluctance to hear her.  She even, since she sat next to her, nudged her familiarly in her rigid black silk side.

“What room are you in, Miss Stark?” said she.

“I am at a loss how to designate the room,” replied Miss Stark stiffly.