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Mrs Nugent regarded the whole with a tender kind of severity, shaking her head slowly frohtly tilted She was a full-bodied lady, in clothes rather too tight for her, and she panted a little after the ascent of the stairs It seeely and inexplicably perverse act of Providence, to whom she had always paid deference, by which so incalculable a rise in the social scale had been denied to her

Then she advanced a step, her eyes straying froain Then she set the candlestick upon the table and turned round

It ent was utterly without a trace of what is known as superstition; for the whole evidential value of what follows, such as it is, depends upon that fact She would not, by preference, sleep in a room immediately after a death had taken place in it, but solely for the reason of certain ill-defined physical theories which she would have suht that the air should be changed" Her views on human nature and its component parts were undoubtedly practical and common-sense To put it brutally, Amy's body was in the churchyard and Amy's soul, crowned and robed, in heaven; so there was noofof the revival of ancient beliefs; she would have regarded with kindly co shrinking from scenes of death occasionally manifested by certain kind of temperaments

She turned, then, and looked at the wardrobe, still full of As, with her back to the bed in which Amy had died, without even the faintest pre terror that presently seized upon her

It came about in this way

She kneeled down, after a careful scrutiny of the polished surface of theover with linen of various kinds and uses, and began to dive a these with careful housewifely hands to discover their tale Simultaneously, as she re down fro horse

She paused to listen, her es so quickly up in the thoughts of village dwellers, her hands for an instant ht be the doctor, or Mr Paton, or Mr Grove Those naain in a kind of fear of which she could give afterwards no account