tter along here. But they
seem to like their nephew, and certainly he's got money enough."

"They adore him," said Lydia, who had never seen them or the nephew.
"And they're lying in gold beds at this minute eating silver cheese off
an emerald plate and hearing the nightingales singing and saying to each
other, 'Oh, my! I _wish_ it was morning so we could get up and put on
our pan-velvet dresses and new gold shoes.'"

This effective picture Anne and the colonel received with a perfect
gravity, not really seeing it with the mind's eye. Lydia's habit of
speech demanded these isolating calms.

"I think," said Anne, "we'd better be getting to the Inn. We sha'n't
find any supper. Lydia, which bag did you pack our nighties in?"

Lydia picked out the bag, carolling, as she did so, in high bright
notes, and then remembered that she had to put on her hat. Anne had
already adjusted hers with a careful nicety.

"You know where the Inn is, don't you, Farvie?" Lydia was asking, as
they stood on the stone step, after Anne had locked the door, and gazed
about them in another of their according trances.

He smiled at them, and his eyes lighted for the first time. The smile
showed possibilities the girls had proven through their growing up
years, of humour and childish fooling.

"Why, yes," said he, "it was here when I was born."

They went down the curving driveway into the street which the two girls
presently found to be the state street of the town. The houses, each
with abundant grounds, had all a formal opulence due chiefly to the
white-pillared fronts. Anne grew dreamy. It seemed to her as if she were
walking by a line of Greek temples in an afternoon hush. The colonel was
naming the houses as they passed, with good old names. Here were the
Jarvises, here the Russells, and here the Lockes.

"But I don't know," said he, "what's become of them all."

At a corner by a mammoth elm he turned down into another street,
elm-shaded, almost as wide, and led them to the Inn, a long, low-browed
structure built in the eighteenth century and never without guests.

II

The next morning brought a confusion of arriving freight, and Denny was
supplicated to provide workmen, clever artificers in the opening of
boxes and the setting up of beds. He was fired by a zeal not all
curiosity, a true interest assuaged by certainty more enlivening yet.

"I know who ye be," he announced to the colonel. This was on his arrival
with the fi