chill. Anne, the poignant memory of her, was certainly there with him as
he stood absently following with his eyes the bridge-crossed road of the
old landscape paper and thinking how different it used to look when the
summer sunlight struck it through the open door; and Anne was beating,
with her beautiful hands, at his unwilling heart, crying:

"Let me in! let me in to crowd Nan and that common woman out!"

Nan, coming down with a roll under her arm, glanced at him, perturbed.
He had, she judged, been seeing ghosts. They went out and locked the
door behind them (locking in, Nan silently hoped, the ghosts also), and
hurried back along the road. And when they had gone into his house
again, Raven told her to run upstairs and put her things in the west
chamber.

"Scatter 'em all over the place," said he. "Amelia'll fight for that
room. She'll fight tooth and nail. I sha'n't let her have it, not even
if you give it up. Understand?"

"But what is she going to have?" Nan asked, from the stairs.

"She's going to sleep down here, back of the dining-room," said Raven
perversely, "in the room they made over for Old Crow when they were
going to get him to give up the hut and come down here to die. Amelia's
scared out of her boots in the country, unless she hears voices on every
side of her. I know Amelia. Cut along and come down again and help me
set the scene."

They did set the scene, with an exhilaration that played back and forth
between them like a heady atmosphere. Charlotte was bidden to make the
bed in Old Crow's room and while Raven built the fire, Nan helped
Charlotte. And when the pung drove up from the station at the moment Nan
had foreseen, she and Raven were sitting before the dining-room fire,
apparently deep in talk. Whether Charlotte took her cue from them they
did not know, but she was too busy in the back of the house to appear at
once, and Mrs. Powell and Dick came in unheralded, turning first to the
dining-room. There sat the two, absorbed. The visitors began, on an
according note.

"John!" cried Amelia, and "Nan!" Dick cried, in an identical voice.
Raven and Nan had the same effect of unison. They laughed, it was so
exactly what they had known it would be, and Raven came forward, put his
hands on his sister's shoulders, and gave her a little shake.

"Now, Milly," he said, "what the dickens are you up here for?"

Nan, having alienists on her mind, and finding none, was plumping her
question at Dick