Upon Nancy's face, as she closed her own door behind her, was a mixture of relief, indignation and apprehension. And a little of each of these emotions crept into the lines of the letter that--to give vent to all that was bursting within her--she dashed off to Claire. "---- You'd just better believe that if I had that precious darling, Anne Leavitt, back in our beloved tower room I'd tell her that all the fortunes in the world and all the suffering Russians wouldn't hire me to spend one more day with her 'family.' "And yet, Claire, darling, it's so _dreadful_ that it's funny. I just wonder that I haven't been scared _pink!_ Can you picture your little Nancy surrounded by mahogany, so old that it fairly screams at you, that it was brought over on the _Mayflower_ and walls as high as the Library tower (please subtract poetical license) and just oodles of Leavitt traditions--though I'll admit, just being a plain human mortal, I don't know yet quite _what_ the Leavitt traditions are, but believe me, I expect to, very soon, for Aunt Sabrina talks of nothing else! "Of course, sweet child, you can't make head or tail to all my jibberish, so I'll write lucid English now. The Island is wonderfully beautiful, everything about it seems different from any other part of the world--the trees are bigger and the grass is greener and every now and then you catch a glimpse of Lake Champlain as blue as Anne's sapphire ring and hazy purple mountains beyond. And the whole place is brimming with all kinds of historical stories. "They call this house Happy House. It was named that by the first Anne Leavitt, and she had a mantel made in England with the letters carved on it, and the day after it was put up she died in the very room I'm writing in! Isn't that tragic and exciting? I can't make a story out of that, though, for it's been all written up in a book they sell at North Hero. "The house is big and built of stone that was quarried on the Island, and it's all covered with vines and is beautiful--outside. It has trees all around it that meet overhead like a canopy, and instead of a regular garden in beds the ground's all covered with tiger lilies and Sweet William and phlox and lots of flowers I don't know the name of, that look as though they'd spilled out over their gardens and grew everywhere. And there's a darling old gardener who is a descendant of Ethan Allen. "In fact, everyone I've seen is old and, Webb said, is descended from 'somebody or other.'