All that Sunday Julie was haunted by the thought of Mr. and Mrs.
Bixby’s taking Aunt Sadie’s furnished rooms upstairs. They would all be
at very close quarters if they did. Julie kept the store and her three
neat little rooms at the back. The other half of the house she rented
to Aunt Sadie, who in turn rented out the upstairs floor as a small
furnished apartment. Two doors, one upstairs and one down, connected
the establishments. The one downstairs opened from Julie’s small hall
straight into Aunt Sadie’s sitting-room. The other was at the top of
Julie’s flight of stairs and gave on the rooms above. Neither of these
doors had ever been locked. Julie and Aunt Sadie were in the habit of
running unceremoniously in and out of one another’s quarters by way of
the downstairs door, and even the upstairs one Julie had always left
unfastened, in case the tenants above desired to come down through her
hall and so out to the side street.
Julie was seized that afternoon with a panic over that door.
She was in her sitting-room, seated by the window with her church paper
in her lap. The wind blew fitfully in, bringing her the scent of roses
from her little plot. She wanted to go out and work around the bushes,
but she did not think that was right on Sunday; so after drifting
discreetly about the garden, inspecting each plant and little clump of
blossoms, she had retired indoors, and settled herself with the _Sunday
Record_, which she subscribed to dutifully, and which she usually held
in her lap on Sabbath afternoons, but which she rarely read.
She was half asleep over it now, when suddenly the thought of that
unlocked door at the head of her stairs leaped in her mind, startling
her broad awake.
“Oh, my soul! That door’s unlocked,” she thought. She felt all at once
exposed, as though some one--Elizabeth Bixby, for instance--might run
unexpectedly in on her when she was undressed.
“I got to lock it,” she breathed. “I got to lock it ’fore that woman
moves in. She’ll be runnin’ down on me every minute if I don’t.”
She ran up the stairs and slammed the door shut; but when her hand
felt for the key, there was none in the lock. She jerked the door open
and looked on the other side; it was not there either. “My soul! The
key’s lost,” she cried in despair. “I got to find a key. I _got_ to
lock that door ’fore she gets here.” She hurried downstairs, and found
a box of odd keys; returning with them she began trying one after
another, haste and anxiety growing upon her, and her hand so unsteady
that the keys made a small chattering against the lock. At any moment
she felt the stillness of the rooms might dissolve and Elizabeth
Bixby’s crushing personality be upon her. Indeed, now she heard some
one coming up the outside stairway. Breathlessly she peeped forth
through the vista of rooms, and waited. But it was only Aunt Sadie’s
familiar gray head that came into view. She pushed upon the door, and
caught sight of Julie.
“My lands! Is that you, Julie? Well, I thought I heard somebody up
here,” she cried.
“Has that woman taken the rooms?” Julie demanded.
“Yes, they plan to move in, in the mornin’. _Now_ what’s scared you,
Julie?”
“I--I can’t find a key to this door,” Julie said weakly.
“Well, what of that? It ain’t never been locked.”
“I won’t have that Mrs. Bixby running down on me every minute,” Julie
cried hysterically. “She’ll be in and out of the store all the time; I
know she will. But I won’t _have_ her running down into my home place!”
“Well,” Aunt Sadie said in her large and placid way, “I wouldn’t take
it as hard as all that, but I believe you’re about right. I’m not so
struck on the woman, myself. She’s a right airy piece. I hated to let
her have the rooms after the way she turned up her nose at ’em. But I
did want the money for the rent, and there really ain’t any other place
I know of in town for them to go to, and I felt sorry for that little
man. He’s a kind of pitiful little feller. It looks like he tries so
hard, an’ she just snaps him off every time.”
“I can’t get a key to fit,” Julie said, going on desperately with her
attempt to lock the door.
“Here, let’s see how this’ll do,” Aunt Sadie offered, taking a key
out of the closet door of the room they were in, and trying it in the
lock. “There now,” she said triumphantly as the key slipped into
place, “Now you go on out your side, and I’ll lock the door, and put
the key back in the closet here. When she comes she’ll find the door
fastened an’ never think to try to unlock it.”
Julie withdrew reluctantly. Outside she waited until she heard the key
scrape in the lock. Then she tried the door, and being assured that it
was really secure, she went down the steps to her own demesne, with a
feeling of relief and safety.