is an adventure."

"Greatheart?"

"Yes."

"You loved him too?"

"Yes."

Anne caught her breath. "To think of him dead--to think of them
all--dead."

Maxwell looked down at her. "They live somewhere. You believe that,
don't you?"

"Yes."

He was silent for a moment; then he laid his hand lightly on her
shoulder. "I feel to-night as if they pressed close."

Oh, it was a rare game to meet great souls in odd corners! They could
scarcely tear themselves away. But he got her home before her sisters
arrived, and Anne went to bed soberly, and lay long awake, thinking it
out. She had never before had such a playmate. In all these years she
had starved for other things than food.

IV

In due time Congress adjourned, but Maxwell did not go home. He
continued to see Anne. Amy was at last driven to her duty by Murray. She
could not forbid Maxwell the house. There was nothing to do but talk to
Anne.

Having made up her mind she sought Anne's room at once. Anne, in a
cheap cotton kimono, was braiding her hair for the night. The sleeves of
the kimono were short and showed her thin white arms. Amy had on a
blanket wrapper. Her hair was in metal curlers. She looked old and
tired, and now and then she coughed.

Anne got into bed and drew the covers up to her chin. "I'm so cold, I
believe there are icicles on my eyebrows. Amy, my idea of heaven is a
place where it is as hot as--Hades."

"I don't see where you get such ideas. Ethel and I don't talk that way.
We don't even think that way, Anne."

"Maybe when I am as old as you---" Anne began, and was startled at the
look on Amy's face.

"I'm not old!" Amy said passionately. "Anne, I haven't lived at all, and
I'm only thirty."

Anne stared at her. "Oh, my darling, I didn't mean---"

"Of course you didn't. And it was silly of me to say such a thing. Anne,
I'm cold. I'm going to sit on the foot of your bed and wrap up while I
talk to you."

Anne's bed had four pineapple posts and a pink canopy. The governor of a
state had slept in that bed for years. He was one of the Merryman
grandfathers. Amy could have bought mountains of food for the price of
that bed. But she would have starved rather than sell it.

Anne under the pink canopy was like a rose--a white rose with a faint
flush. The color in Amy's cheeks was fixed and hard. Yet even with her
oldness and tiredness and metal curlers she had the look of race which
attracted Murray.

"Anne," she said, "Murray