She wondered if she and Lois would go to Elliot to live, and who would live in her tenement.

The change was hard for her to contemplate, and she wept a little.

Many a happiness comes to its object with outriders of sorrows to others.
Poor Amanda bemoaned herself over the changes that might come to her little home, and planned nervously her manner of living with Lois during the next week.

Amanda had lived entirely alone for over twenty years; this admitting another to her own territory seemed as grave a matter to her as the admission of foreigners did to Japan.

Indeed, all her kind were in a certain way foreigners to Amanda; and she was shy of them, she had so withdrawn herself by her solitary life, for solitariness is the farthest country of them all.
Amanda did not sleep much, and it was very early in the morning--she was standing before the kitchen looking-glass, twisting the rosettes of her front hair--when Mrs.Field came in to say good-by.