“We’ve often talked of it, Nan and I,” Joan proceeded; “it did not seem very vital one way or the other until now.”

“As far as I know,” Doris was surprised at her own calmness, “he is still alive.”

“I’m glad of that,” Joan remarked, and there was a glint in her eyes.  “I’d hate to have him dead—­just now.”

Quite without reason Doris laughed.  After all, what she had conjured up as a ghost was turning into a human possibility.  It was never to frighten her in the future.  Joan had felled the spectre by her first stroke.

Then Nancy spoke: 

“I never want to hear his name again,” she said, firmly, relentlessly.

Doris looked at her in amazement.  Later she confided to Joan her surprise.

“I did not know the child had such sternness.”

Joan shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

“Nan is like a rock underneath, Aunt Dorrie,” she said.  “I suppose it is—­what shall I say?—­blood!  It is concentrated in Nan.  She’s like you.  Disgrace, or what seemed like disgrace, would kill her—­it would make me fight!”

And after that conversation all inclination to confide further in the girls as to their relationship or lack of it deserted Doris.

She saw a new cause for caution and went back to the stand she had taken when the children were babies—­but with far less courage.

“When they marry, of course, it must be told.”

Doris returned to New York in September, and after a fortnight in which she closed the old house and made arrangements for the servants, she was so exhausted that she gladly turned her face southward.

Nancy, already, was her mainstay.  The girl had apparently got under the burden, and held it secure on her firm, young shoulders.  She developed initiative and the healing touch.  No one disputed her where Doris was concerned, and Martin grimly accepted her as the most necessary thing in the hope that lay in Ridge House.

Their appearance there was marked by two incidents that Doris alone heeded.

First was the effect Nancy had upon Jed.

The man stared at the girl as if he saw a ghost.  Like the very old, his real sensations lay in the past.  Nancy stirred him strangely.  The emotion was like a warm ray of sunlight striking in a dark place.  Doris watched him with interest and concern; but Jed had no words with which to enlighten her.  He only smiled wider, more often, and took to following Nancy like a wavering, distorted shadow.

The second incident was Mary.

From her cabin across the river she had manipulated the arrangements at Ridge House so perfectly that the machinery was oiled and running when the family arrived.

Mary was more reserved, more self-contained than she had ever been, but again, as Martin said to Doris, she must be judged by what she did, not by what she suggested, and she had accomplished marvels not only at the old place, but in her cabin across The Gap.  In her once-deserted home Mary had contrived to resurrect all the ideals that had perished with her forebears.  The rooms shone and glittered; the garden throve; and Mary spun and wove and designed and made money.  She was respected, feared, and secretly believed to be “low-down mean,” but calmly she went her way.