The Prisoner

								

her dream. There was nothing ever more warm and grateful than Lydia's
acceptances and her trust in the bright promise of the new. Anne didn't
do that kind of thing. She hesitated at thresholds and looked forward,
not distrustfully but gravely, into dim interiors.
"Farvie, dear," said Lydia, "I love it just as much now as I could in a
hundred years. It's our house. I feel as if I'd been born in it."
Farvie looked about over the orchard, under its foam of white and pink;
his eyes suffused and he put his delicate lips firmly together. But all
he said was:
"They haven't kept the trees very well pruned."
"There's Anne," said Lydia, loosing her hold of his sleeve. She ran
light-footedly back to Anne, and patted her with warm receptiveness.
"Anne, look: apple trees, pear trees, peach in that corner. See that big
bush down there."
"Quince," said Anne dreamily. She had her hat off now, and her fine soft
brown hair, in silky disorder, attracted her absent-minded care. But
Lydia had pulled out the pin of her own tight little hat with its
backward pointing quill and rumpled her hair in the doing and never
knew it; now she transfixed the hat with a joyous stab.
"Never mind your hair," said she. "What idiots we were to write to the
Inn. Why couldn't we stay here to-night? How can we leave it? We can't.
Did you ever see such a darling place? Did you ever imagine a brick wall
like that? Who built it, Farvie? Who built the brick wall?"
Farvie was standing with his hands behind him, thinking back, the girls
knew well, over the years. A mournful quiet was in his face. They could
follow for a little way the cause of his sad thoughts, and were willing,
each in her own degree of impulse, to block him in it, make running
incursions into the road, twitch him by the coat and cry, "Listen to us.
Talk to us. You can't go there where you were going. That's the road to
hateful memories. Listen to that bird and tell us about the brick wall."
Farvie was used to their invasions of his mind. He never went so far as
clearly to see them as salutary invasions to keep him from the
melancholy accidents of the road, an ambulance dashing up to lift his
bruised hopes tenderly and take them off somewhere for sanitary
treatment, or even some childish sympathy of theirs commissioned to run
up and offer him a nosegay to distract him in his walk toward old
disappointments and old cares. He only knew they were welcome visitants
in his mind. Sometimes the mind seemed to him a clean-swept place, the
shades down and no fire lighted, and these young creatures, in their
heavenly implication of doing everything for their own pleasure and not
for his, would come in, pull up the shades with a rush, light the fire
and sit down with their sewing and their quite as necessary laughter by
the hearth.
"It's a nice brick wall," said Anne, in her cool clear voice. "It
doesn't seem so much to shut other people out as to shut us in."