The Prisoner

								

white-pillared fronts. Anne grew dreamy. It seemed to her as if she were
walking by a line of Greek temples in an afternoon hush. The colonel was
naming the houses as they passed, with good old names. Here were the
Jarvises, here the Russells, and here the Lockes.
"But I don't know," said he, "what's become of them all."
At a corner by a mammoth elm he turned down into another street,
elm-shaded, almost as wide, and led them to the Inn, a long, low-browed
structure built in the eighteenth century and never without guests.

II

The next morning brought a confusion of arriving freight, and Denny was
supplicated to provide workmen, clever artificers in the opening of
boxes and the setting up of beds. He was fired by a zeal not all
curiosity, a true interest assuaged by certainty more enlivening yet.
"I know who ye be," he announced to the colonel. This was on his arrival
with the first load. "I ain't lived in town very long, or I should known
it afore. It's in the paper."
Mr. Blake frowned slightly and seemed to freeze all over the surface he
presented to the world. He walked away without a reply, but Lydia, who
had not heard, came up at this point to ask Denny if he knew where she
could find a maid.
"Sure I do," said Denny, who was not Irish but consorted with common
speech. "My wife's two sisters, Mary Nellen, Prince Edward girls."
"We don't want two," said Lydia. "My sister and I do a lot of the work."
"The two of them," said Denny, "come for the price of one. They're
studyin' together to set up a school in Canada, and they can't be
separated. They'd admire to be with nice folks."
"Mary? did you say?" asked Lydia.
"Mary Nellen."
"Mary and Ellen?"
"Yes, Mary Nellen. I'll send 'em up."
That afternoon they came, pleasant-faced square little trudges with
shiny black hair and round myopic eyes. This near-sightedness when they
approached the unclassified, resulted in their simultaneously making up
the most horrible faces, the mere effort of focusing. Mary Nellen--for
family affection, recognising their complete twin-ship, always blended
them--were aware of this disfiguring habit, but relegated the curing of
it to the day of their future prosperity. They couldn't afford glasses
now, they said. They'd rather put their money into books. This according
and instantaneous grimace Lydia found engaging. She could not possibly
help hiring them, and they appeared again that night with two battered
tin boxes and took up residence in the shed chamber.
There had been some consultation about the disposition of chambers. It
resolved itself into the perfectly reasonable conclusion that the
colonel must have the one he had always slept in, the southeastern
corner.
"But there's one," said Lydia, "that's sweeter than the whole house put
together. Have you fallen in love with it, Anne? It's that low, big room
back of the stairs. You go down two steps into it. There's a grape-vine