As Sylvia and Charlotte came to the front door it seemed as if they might fairly walk through it as through a gray shadow; but Sylvia stooped, and her shoulders strained with seemingly incongruous force, as if she were spending it to roll 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 towards the light.  And Sylvia had set also on the table a burnished pitcher of a rosy copper-color full of apple blossoms.

She looked at it when she had set the candle on the shelf.  It seemed to her that all the light in the room centred on it, and it shone in her eyes like a copper lamp.