he right of the
hall, a large square room with a generous fireplace well blackened and
large surfaces of old ivory paint. There was a landscape paper here, of
trees in a smoky mist and dull blue skies behind a waft of cloud. Out of
this lay the dining-room, all in green, and the windows of both rooms
looked on a gigantic lilac hedge, and beyond it the glimmer of a white
colonial house set back in its own grounds. The kitchen was in a
lean-to, a good little kitchen brown with smoke, and behind that was the
shed with dark cobwebbed rafters and corners that cried out for hoes and
garden tools. Lydia went through the rooms in a rush of happiness, Anne
in a still rapt imagining. Things always seemed to her the symbols of
dearer things. She saw shadowy shapes sitting at the table and breaking
bread together, saw moving figures in the service of the house, and
generations upon generations weaving their webs of hope and pain and
disillusionment and hope again. In the shed they stood looking out at
the back door through the rolling field, where at last a fringe of
feathery yellow made the horizon line.

"What's at the end of the field, Farvie?" Lydia asked.

"The river," said he. "Nothing but the river."

"I feel," said she, "as if we were on an island surrounded by
jumping-off places: the bushes in front, the lilac hedge on the west,
the brick wall on the east, the river at the end. Come, let's go back.
We haven't seen the other two rooms."

These were the northeast room, a library in the former time, in a dim,
pink paper with garlands, and the southeast sitting-room, in a modern
yet conforming paper of dull blue and grey.

"The hall is grey," said Lydia. "Do you notice? How well they've kept
the papers. There isn't a stain."

"Maiden ladies," said the colonel, with a sigh. "Nothing but two maiden
ladies for so long."

"Don't draw long breaths, Farvie," said Lydia. "Anne and I are maiden
ladies. You wouldn't breathe over us. We should feel terribly if you
did."

"I was thinking how still the house had been," said he. "It used to
be--ah, well! well!"

"They grew old here, didn't they?" said Anne, her mind taking the maiden
ladies into its hospitable shelter.

"They were old when they came." He was trying to put on a brisker air to
match these two runners with hope for their torch. "Old as I am now. If
their poor little property had lasted we should have had hard work to
pry them out. We should have had to let 'em po