“You won’t need to be frightened.  I understand, I think—­and here’s your key, I always carry it in my pocket.  Your Father’s candle is on the mantel.  You shall have to-night to yourself.  Good-night, and bless your home-coming, dear!”

“Good-night,” I answered as I turned away from his kind eyes quickly, to keep from clinging-to him with might and main, and crossed the road to my own gate.  With my head up, and trying for the whistle, at least in my heart, I went quickly along the front walk with its rows of blush peonies, nodding along either edge.  The two old purple lilacs beside the front steps have grown so large they seemed to be barring my way into my home with longing, sweet embraces, and a fragrant little climbing rose, that has rioted across the front door, ever since I could remember, bent down and left a kiss on my cheeks.

The warm, mellow old moon flooded a glow in front of me, through the big front door, as I opened it, and then hastened to pour into the wide windows as I threw back the shutters.

Logs lay ready for lighting in the wide fireplace at the end of the long room, and Father’s tobacco jar gleamed a reflected moonlight from its pewter sides from the tall mantel-shelf.  The old hooks melted into the dusk of their cases along the wall, and the portrait of Grandfather Shelby lost its fierce gaze and became benign from its place between the windows.

I was being welcomed to the home of my fathers, with a soft dusk that was as still and sweet as the grave.  Sweet for those that want it; but I didn’t.  Suddenly, I thrilled as alive as any terror-stricken woman that ever found herself alone anywhere on any other edge of the world, and then as suddenly found myself in a complete condition of fright prostration, crouched on my own threshold.  I was frightened at the dark, and could not even cry.  Then almost immediately, while I crouched quivering in every nerve I seemed to hear a man’s voice say comfortingly: 

“You don’t need to be frightened.”

Courageously I lifted my eyes and looked down between the old lilac bushes, and saw just what I expected I would, a tall, gray figure, pacing slowly up and down the road.  Then it was that fear came into me, stiffened my muscles and strengthened my soul—­fear of myself and my own conclusions about destiny and all things pertaining thereto.

I never want to go through such another hour as I spent putting things in order in Father’s room, which opens off the living-room, so I could go to bed by candle-light in the bed in which he and I were both born.  I wanted to sleep there, and didn’t even open any other part of the grim old house.

And when I put out the candle and lay in the high, old four-post bed, I again felt as small as I really am, and I was in danger of a bad collapse from self-depreciation when my humor came to the rescue.  I might just as well have gone on and slept between Henrietta and the wall, as was becoming my feminine situation, for here my determination to assert my masculine privileges was keeping a real man doing sentry duty up and down a moonlight road all night—­and I wanted it.