wound down from the Old Road whereon Miss Henderson's mansion faced, a
gateway in a white paling that ran round and fenced in a grassy door
yard, overhung with pendent branches of elms and stouter canopy of
chestnuts, let them in upon the little "Cross Corners Farm."

"Oh, Aunt Faith! It's just as lovely as ever! I remember that path up
the hill, among the trees, so well! When I was a little bit of a girl,
and nurse and I came out to stay with you. I had my 'fairy house' there.
I'd like to go over this minute, only that we shan't have time. How
shall we get in? Where is the key?"

"It's in my pocket. But it mystifies me, what you want there."

"I want to look out of all the windows, auntie, to begin with."

Aunt Faith's mystification was not lessened.

The front door opened on a small, square hall, with doors to right and
left. The room on the left, spite of the bare floor and fireless
hearth, was warm with the spring sunshine that came pouring in at the
south windows. Beyond this, embracing the corner of the house
rectangularly, projected an equally sunny and cheery kitchen; at the
right of which, communicating with both apartments, was divided off a
tiny tea and breakfast room. So Faith decided, though it had very likely
been a bedroom.

From the entrance hall at the right opened a room larger than either of
the others--so large that the floor above afforded two bedrooms over
it--and having, besides its windows south and east, a door in the
farther corner beyond the chimney, that gave out directly upon the
grassy slope, and looked up the path among the trees that crossed the
ridge.

Faith drew the bolt and opened it, expecting to find a closet or a
passage somewhither. She fairly started back with surprise and delight.
And then seated herself plump upon the threshold, and went into a
midsummer dream.

"Oh, auntie!" she cried, at her waking, presently, "was ever anything so
perfect? To think of being let out so! Right from a regular, proper
parlor, into the woods!"

"Do you mean to go upstairs?" inquired Miss Henderson, with a vague
amaze in her look that seemed to question whether her niece had not
possibly been "let out" from her "regular and proper" wits!

Whereupon Faith scrambled up from her seat upon the sill, and hurried
off to investigate above.

Miss Henderson closed the door, pushed the bolt, and followed quietly
after.

It was a funny little pantomime that Faith enacted then, for the further