“ ‘Well, you get your mind in order, you hear me?’ he went on. ‘And in the meantime, put this woman’s cameos back in her trunk. Close that trunk. Shut it up tight. That trunk is Pandora’s Box. You let her spirit out when you opened it, so put everything you took out of it back.’

“He paused for a moment, and then he turned and stared at me with his wan expression and his pale face.

“ ‘I’ve given you all I can give you,’ he said. ‘I don’t have anything more to teach you. Lynelle taught things that I could never teach you. She was better than school, I don’t argue with it. But you’re wasting your time now. You’re wasting everything. And I know perfectly well that you won’t go to any college right now, and maybe even at age eighteen that’s not the right thing. But Aunt Queen has got to come home and she’s got to find you a new teacher and she’s got to take you on.’

“I nodded. Aunt Queen wasn’t terribly far away at this time. She was attending a seminar in Barbados, and I knew that Pops would call her and that she’d be coming home. I hated it, hated that he would interrupt her, but after what had happened she’d definitely be called home.

“Pops stared at me for a long time, and then he went out of my room.

“I felt a dull shock because in all the years I had lived with Pops he had never spoken that many words to me at any one time. Also I had seen that he was weak and washed out, and no longer the hale and hearty individual that he had always been.

“That I had caused him worry upset me something fierce.

“I went down to the parlor and I got the cameos out of the display case which I had taken from the trunk. I brought them up to my room, and I resolved that tomorrow by daylight, I’d go up to the attic and put them back. Maybe. Maybe not. After all, the ghost hadn’t said anything to me about opening her trunk.

“Again I fell into a doze, and there was a delightful wicked sense of Rebecca being there. Just a thing for pleasure, that’s all I ever was, Quinn. That’s what I’ll be to you, Quinn. This is the time, Quinn, just a thing of pleasure, that’s all I ever wanted to be. Somebody’s jewel, somebody’s ornament, somebody’s pet, who knows?

“Sometime very late Big Ramona came and roused me and told me to dress for bed. I did what she told me, and when I came out of the bathroom in my long flannel nightshirt, she looked at me and said:

“ ‘You’re too old for me to be sleeping with you.’