“There is myself.  You see me.  There is nothing more to that.  And there are the three children, Paul, Elly, and Mark, . . .”  She paused here rather abruptly, and the whimsical accent of good-humored mockery disappeared.  For an instant her face changed into something quite different from what they had seen.  Mr. Welles could not at all make out the expression which very passingly had flickered across her eyes with a smoke-like vagueness and rapidity.  He had the queerest fancy that she looked somehow scared,—­but of course that was preposterous.

“Your call,” she told them both, “happens to fall on a day which marks a turning-point in our family life.  This is the very first day in ten years, since Paul’s birth, that I have not had at least one of the children beside me.  Today is the opening of spring term in our country school, and my little Mark went off this morning, for the first time, with his brother and sister.  I have been alone until you came.”  She stopped for a moment.  Mr. Welles wished that Vincent could get over his habit of staring at people so.  She went on, “I have felt very queer indeed, all day.  It’s as though . . . you know, when you have been walking up and up a long flight of stairs, and you go automatically putting one foot up and then the other, and then suddenly . . . your upraised foot falls back with a jar.  You’ve come to the top, and, for an instant, you have a gone feeling without your stairs to climb.”

It occurred to Mr. Welles that really perhaps the reason why some nice ladies did not like Vincent was just because of his habit of looking at them so hard.  He could have no idea how piercingly bright his eyes looked when he fixed them on a speaker like that.  And now Mrs. Crittenden was looking back at him, and would notice it. He could understand how a refined lady would feel as though somebody were almost trying to find a key-hole to look in at her,—­to have anybody pounce on her so, with his eyes, as Vincent did.  She couldn’t know, of course, that Vincent went pouncing on ladies and baggagemen and office boys, and old friends, just the same way.  He bestirred himself to think of something to say.  “I wish I could get up my nerve to ask you, Mrs. Crittenden, about one other person in this house,” he ventured, “the old woman . . . the old lady . . . who let us in the door.”

At the sound of his voice Mrs. Crittenden looked away from Vincent quickly and looked at him for a perceptible moment before she heard what he had said.  Then she explained, smiling, “Oh, she would object very much to being labeled with the finicky title of ‘lady.’  That was Toucle, our queer old Indian woman,—­all that is left of old America here.  She belongs to our house, or perhaps I should say it belongs to her.  She was born here, a million years ago, more or less, when there were still a few basket-making Indians left in the valley.  Her father and mother both died, and she was brought up by the old Great-uncle Crittenden’s