away a shadow. On the flat
doorstep lay a large round stone, pushed close against the door.
There were no locks and keys in the old Crane place; only bolts.
Sylvia could not fasten the doors on the inside when she went away,
so she adopted this expedient, which had been regarded with favor by
her mother and grandmother before her, and illustrated natures full
of gentle fallacies which went far to make existence comfortable.

Always on leaving the house alone the Crane women had bolted the side
door, which was the one in common use, gone out the front one, and
laboriously rolled this same round stone before it. Sylvia reasoned
as her mother and grandmother before her, with the same simplicity:
"When the stone's in front of the door, folks must know there ain't
anybody to home, because they couldn't put it there if they was."

And when some neighbor had argued that the evil-disposed might roll
away the stone and enter at will, Sylvia had replied, with the
innocent conservatism with which she settled an argument, "Nobody
ever did."

To-night she rolled away the stone to the corner of the door-step,
where it had lain through three generations when the Crane women were
at home, and sighed with regret that she had defended the door with
it. "I wish I hadn't put the stone up," she thought. "If I hadn't,
mebbe he'd gone in an' waited." She opened the door, and the gloom of
the house, deeper than the gloom of the night, appeared. "You wait
here a minute," she said to Charlotte, "an' I'll go in an' light a
candle."

Charlotte waited, leaning against the door-post. There was a flicker
of fire within. Then Sylvia held the flaring candle towards her.
"Come in," she said; "the candle's lit."

There was a bed of coals on the hearth in the best room; Sylvia had
made a fire there before going over to her sister's, but it had
burned low. The glow of the coals and the smoky flare of the candle
lighted the room uncertainly, scattering and not dispelling the
shadows. There was a primly festive air in the room. The
flag-bottomed chairs stood by twos, finely canted towards each other,
against the wall; the one great hair-cloth rocker stood
ostentatiously in advance of them, facing the hearth fire; the long
level of the hair-cloth sofa gleamed out under stiff sweeps of the
white fringed curtains at the window behind it. The books on the
glossy card-table were set canting towards each other like the
chairs, and with their gilt edges towa