Why did I leave New York ?" And setting the lamp down, she covered her face and wept.
The storm abated; a few minutes of fiercely pouring rain, and all was over.

She was left in ghastly quiet--a quiet which was almost worse than the turmoil which had preceded it--to face her memories and accustom herself to the thought that the solitary woman with whose life everything she looked upon was so intimately connected was gone, never to pass through these doors again or touch with deft and careful fingers the infinite number of little belongings with which the house was filled.
For as yet nothing had been changed, nothing had been moved.

How fitting this was, Antoinette knew better than anybody else, perhaps, for she was the only person whom Elvira Brown had ever allowed to spend any length of time with her, and she could remember--alas! how vividly, in spite of the one great fear forever gnawing at her heart--that an article, no matter how small, when once given place in this house, held that place always till broken or in some other way robbed of its usefulness.

She looked at her friend's pet chair standing just in the one spot where she had seen it eight years before, and her heart swelled, and a tear rose in her eye.
But there was not time for another.

A sense of the straits in which she found herself placed by the death of this dependable friend returned upon her in full force; the past retired into its old place, and the present, with its maddening problems, seized upon her nerve and quelled her once indomitable spirit.
The fate which had pursued her ever since she had left her happy home in France had not spared her at this crisis.