“Perhaps they aren’t,” Kate answered, aloud. She remembered her flight that very morning toward the slowly opening many-coloured portals of sleep. Morning-glories might very well be growing on Sleep’s walls.
But whom had she answered? Who had spoken? No one, of course. There was no one there _to_ speak, except Kate herself.
On either side the hall there was another bedroom. Kate merely looked in at their doors. One had been her mother’s, and it was entirely bare now, for all the furniture had gone to the barn-house in Ashland years ago. The other had been Grandfather Frazier’s room, and somehow Kate felt that she did not want to pry there. It would be like getting acquainted with him when his back was turned.
Now there remained only the “playroom” and the upstairs “study”—a long room at the back of the house, the room where the windows had stood open that first night of Kate’s arrival—and ever since, for all she knew. From her very first entrance into the house Kate had been _listening_ toward this room. It was in that room she fully expected to discover Elsie’s secret. It was really the goal of her pilgrimage through the house. But the nearer she drew to it physically the more she drew back mentally. She was not exactly frightened. What did not frighten Elsie need not frighten her. It was simply uneasiness in the face of mystery.
There was the playroom between, though. Kate was grateful to pause a minute in the playroom.
The playroom was down a step, through a little low door. Kate had to bend her head to go through the door. It was the smallest room she had ever been in, about the size of a goodly closet. Shelves were built in all around the walls, leaving space only for the one little low window that reached the floor. Before the shelves, strung on brass rings to brass rods, hung dusty, faded calico curtains, yellow flowers on a blue background. Kate pushed back a curtain, jangling all its rings. The shelves held a jumble of toys, birds, beasts, carts, engines, and on the top shelf a row of dolls, some broken almost beyond recognition as dolls, but two or three still healthy bisque beauties smiling blandly over her head at the opposite wall.
There were three lilliputian chairs in the room, one a black rocker painted on the back and seat with flowers and fruit. In one corner there was a huge box of blocks, wooden building blocks that Great-grandfather Frazier had made for Grandfather Frazier when he was a little boy.
