The Red Lady

|IT is the discomfort of the thing which comes back upon me, I believe, most forcibly. Of course it was horrible, too, emphatically horrible, but the prolonged, sustained, baffl...

I was housekeeper at the time for little Mrs. Brane. How I had come to be her housekeeper might have served to forewarn me, if I had had the clue. None but an inexperienced, des...

|DOWNSTAIRS, the little room that opened from the drawing-room was given to me by Mrs. Brane for my “office.” Here every morning Jane, Annie, and Delia came to me for orders.

|I FOUND Mary, with Robbie, in the garden. She got up from her rustic chair under a big magnolia tree, and came hurrying to meet me, more to keep me from her charge, I thought,...

|I'LL be glad to get at this kitchen,” said Mary when we went down to survey the scene of our impromptu labors; “those old women were abominably careless. Why, they left enough...

|MARY'S labors and mine did not last very long. At the end of a week, a promising couple applied for the position described in Mrs. Brane's advertisement. They drove up to the h...

|I WENT to bed early that night, and, partially undressing myself, I put on a wrapper and sat on my bed reading till Mary should come to tell me that Robbie had fallen asleep, a...

|IT was fortunate for us all, especially for poor Mary, that, after Robbie's death, Mrs. Brane needed every care and attention that we could give her. For myself, I had expected...

The thing was gone. I put out the light and fled like a hunted creature to my room. There I locked myself in and dropped down on my knees beside my bed.

|I WAS surprised to find, when I examined myself in the glass next morning, that I did not look like a person that has seen a ghost. I had rather more color than usual and my ey...

|I HAVE always loved pine trees since that desperate afternoon, for the very practical reason that the needles prevent the growth of underbrush. My skirts were left free, and my...

|IN vain I tortured my wits; here and there a word was comprehensible. I made out the number 5 and fairly ground my teeth. Here was the key to the secret; here was my chart, and...

|I MEANT to ask Mrs. Brane the next morning to excuse me from my work of cataloguing the books of her husband's library. I had no courage to face Paul Dabney. Unluckily, Mrs. Br...

|I WAS so excited by the importance of Mary's accidental discovery that I folded up the paper, thrust it into my pocket, and was turning towards the desk, when Mary, in an aggri...

|THE woman who had so unmercifully used me had not taken into account the fact that the spirit is stronger than the flesh. Certainly, the next morning I wanted nothing so much a...

|I LIGHTED my candle and stepped into the closet, shutting the door behind me. The small space, no longer cluttered by old odds and ends of gardening tools, was clear to my eyes...

|I HAD news of Brane's death from the very priest whose hands I had mutilated in the door of the trap. The fellow had been disciplined, unfrocked, driven from Russia, where it w...

|I HAD listened to all this as though to voices in a fever. I had been trying to get up my courage for a leap. It seemed to me now a desperate, hopeless undertaking, but it was...

|WITH the death of Madame Trème, and the arrest of Jaffrey and of Maida, the danger to “The Pines” was over. It was a long time, however, before I was allowed to tell my story....