, and I heard a
robin. Anne heard him, too. I saw her smile." But really what Anne
plucked out of the moment was a blurred feeling of peace. The day was
like a cool, soft cheek, the cheek one kisses with calm affection,
knowing it will not be turned away. It was she who first became aware of
Denny, the hackman, and said to him in her liquid voice that laid bonds
of kind responsiveness:

"Do you know the old Blake house?"

Denny nodded. He was a soft, loosely made man with a stubby moustache
picked out in red and a cheerfully dishevelled air of having been up all
night.

"The folks moved out last week," said he. "You movin' in?"

"Yes," Lydia supplied, knowing her superior capacity over the other two,
for meeting the average man. "We're moving in. Farvie, got the checks?"

Denny accepted the checks and, in a neighbourly fashion, helped the
station master in selecting the trunks, no large task when there was but
a drummer's case besides. He went about this meditatively, inwardly
searching out the way of putting the question that should elicit the
identity of his fares. There was a way, he knew. But they had seated
themselves in the hack, and now explained that if he would take two
trunks along the rest could come with the freight due at least by
to-morrow; and he had driven them through the wide street bordered with
elms and behind them what Addington knew as "house and grounds" before
he thought of a way. It was when he had bumped the trunks into the
empty hall and Lydia was paying him from a smart purse of silver given
her by her dancing pupils that he got hold of his inquisitorial outfit.

"I don't know," said Denny, "as I know you folks. Do you come from round
here?"

Lydia smiled at him pleasantly.

"Good night," said she. "Get the freight round in the morning, won't
you? and be sure you bring somebody to help open the crates."

Then Denny climbed sorrowfully up on his box, and when he looked round
he found them staring there as they had stared at the station: only now
he saw they were in a row and "holding hands".

"I think," said Lydia, in rather a hushed voice, as if she told the
others a pretty secret, "it's a very beautiful place."

"You girls haven't been here, have you?" asked the colonel.

"No," said Anne, "you'd just let it when we came to live with you."

Both girls used that delicate shading of their adoptive tie with him.
They and their mother, now these three years dead, had "come to live