“What are they, dear?  I love fairy stories, you know.”

Doris was keeping her voice cool and calm.

“Why, Mary says there is a Rock on a big mountain that is—­bewitched!  And everything near it is, too.  She says things grow on it and you look at them and they are alive, and you can—­can, well, use them!  Mary saw a road once and just went up on it—­it was a bewitched road, and she got—­lost!” Joan’s eyes widened.  “Mary says she’ll have to find her way back somehow, and if Nancy and I are naughty, she’ll go and find it at once!  Nancy is afraid, but I told Mary I’d follow her!

“And then Mary said that once she just longed and longed for a doll—­she had never had one—­and she saw The Ship on The Rock and she went up to it—­that was before she got lost on the road—­and she asked the captain of The Ship for a doll, and he said he would send one to her.  And she went home and that very night—­that very night, Aunt Dorrie, she looked in a room where she heard a funny noise and she saw a live doll!  And while she was looking she saw a tall big lady bring in another.  You see, when The Rock gets alive, everything is alive and Mary had forgot that—­and so the dolls were—­were babies.  Nancy believes that, but I—­tried it on Nancy’s dolls—­and it isn’t true!”

The rain outside beat wildly against the windows; the wind lashed the vines and roared down the chimney.

“Are—­you asleep, Aunt Dorrie?” The silence awed Joan.

“No, dear heart.  I am just thinking.”

And so Doris was—­thinking that she was walking in the dark.  Her own small flashlight had seemed enough to guide her, and here she discovered that it had only shown her one path, the one she had chosen, and all the other paths—­Mary’s, Nancy’s, and Joan’s—­had been disregarded.

Suddenly it seemed as dangerous to have too much faith as too little.

“I want you, Joan, dear, to go up and play, now, with Nancy.  See if you cannot take all the old games and make a new one.  That would be such a pleasant thing to do.”

“Must I, Auntie Dorrie?  I’d rather stay here close to you.  It’s a new game.  I like it here.”

It was hard to send the small, clinging thing away, but Doris was firm.

Once alone, she closed her eyes and let her hands fall, palms upward, on her lap.  She felt tired and perplexed.  There had come a parting of the ways.  Apparently the ninth year was a dangerous year.  What must she do?  Was Mary more ignorant than she seemed or—­more knowing?  What had Mary known at Ridge House?

The dull, quiet girl, as Doris recalled her, seemed merely a part of the machinery of the Sisters’ Home; she had never taken her into account—­but had she been what she seemed?  What was she now?

It was appalling—­in the doubt as to what was, or was not—­to think that so much had been taken for granted.

The children had seemed babies.  The mere physical care had been the main consideration, and while that was going on Joan had grown weary of the old games and Nancy had learned to gain her ends by indirect methods.