That press had been removed. The other press was there still, and throwing
open the doors she surveyed the shelves. She remembered the very peg on
which her hat and jacket used to hang. And the long walks in the great
park, which was to her, then, a world of wonderment!
She wandered about the old corridor, in and out of odd rooms, all
associated with her childhood--quaint old rooms, many of them lumber rooms,
full of odd corners and old cupboards, the meaning of which she used to
strive to divine. How their silence and mystery used to thrill her little
soul! Faded rooms whose mystery had departed, but whose gloom was haunted
with tenderest recollections. In one corner was the reading-chair in which
Mr. Burnett used to sit. At that time she used to sit on his knee, and when
the chair gave way beneath their weight, he had said she was too big a girl
to sit on his knee any longer. The words had seemed to her a little cruel.
She had forgotten the old chair, but now she remembered the very moment
when the servants came to take it away.
Under the window were some fragments of a china bowl which she had broken
when quite a little child. There was a hoop-stick and the hoop which had
been taken down to the blacksmith's to be mended.
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