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." She slipped her hand through the colonel's arm, and they both stood there at his elbow like rosy champions, bound to stick to him to the last, and the bird sang and something eased up in his mind. He seemed to be let off, in this spring twilight, from an exigent task that had shown no signs of easing. Yet he knew he was not really let off. Only the girls were throwing their glamour of youth and hope and bravado over the apprehensive landscape of his fortune as to-morrow's sun would snatch a rosier light from the apple blooms. "My great-grandfather built the wall," said he. He was content to go back to an older reminiscent time when there were, for him, no roads of gloom. "He was a minister, you know: very old-fashioned even then, very direct, knew what he wanted, saw no reason why he shouldn't have it. He wanted a place to meditate in, walk up and down, think out his sermons. So he built the wall. The townspeople didn't take to it much at first, father used to say. But they got accustomed to it. He wouldn't care." "There's a grape-vine over a trellis," said Anne softly. She spoke in a rapt way, as if she had said, "There are angels choiring under the trees. We can hum their songs." "It makes an arbour. Farvie'll sit there and read his Greek," said Lydia. "We can't leave this place to-night. It would be ridiculous, now we've found it. It wouldn't be safe either. Places like this bust up and blow away." "We can get up the beds to-morrow," said Anne. "Then we never'll leave it for a single minute as long as we live. I want to go ever the house. Farvie, can't we go over the house?"