"Hush! hush! why harp upon the horrors that happened so many years ago? 'What's done is done,' and can't be undone," urged the old lady.
"I know it, mother; but it is some sort o' relief to talk—it keeps me from thinking too deep about—"
"About what, Tabby? Don't be a fool!"
"About this, then; as there never was no dreadful thing ever happened to us as didn't happen to happen on a dark, drizzly, dreary Hallow Eve!" whimpered Miss Tabby.
"It is a fatality!" whispered Miss Libby.
"It is a fiddlestick!" snapped the old lady.
"Oh, mother, mother, you can't dispute it! Wasn't it on a Hallow Eve at night that Rosa Blondelle, sleeping calmly in her bed, was mysteriously murdered?" inquired Miss Tabby.
"Yes, yes," impatiently admitted the old lady.
"And wasn't it that same night in the storm that Sybil Berners fled away from her home, some said driven mad by horror, and some said by remorse?"
"Oh yes!" sighed the old lady; "and that was the worst thing as ever she did in her life, for her flight was taken as a proof of conscious guilt. I was very sorry she fled."