“But you are only seventeen at heart,” smiled Anne.

“No, I’m old . . . or rather middle-aged, which is far worse,” sighed Miss Lavendar.  “Sometimes I can pretend I’m not, but at other times I realize it.  And I can’t reconcile myself to it as most women seem to.  I’m just as rebellious as I was when I discovered my first gray hair.  Now, Anne, don’t look as if you were trying to understand.  Seventeen can’t understand.  I’m going to pretend right away that I am seventeen too, and I can do it, now that you’re here.  You always bring youth in your hand like a gift.  We’re going to have a jolly evening.  Tea first . . . what do you want for tea?  We’ll have whatever you like.  Do think of something nice and indigestible.”

There were sounds of riot and mirth in the little stone house that night.  What with cooking and feasting and making candy and laughing and “pretending,” it is quite true that Miss Lavendar and Anne comported themselves in a fashion entirely unsuited to the dignity of a spinster of forty-five and a sedate schoolma’am.  Then, when they were tired, they sat down on the rug before the grate in the parlor, lighted only by the soft fireshine and perfumed deliciously by Miss Lavendar’s open rose-jar on the mantel.  The wind had risen and was sighing and wailing around the eaves and the snow was thudding softly against the windows, as if a hundred storm sprites were tapping for entrance.

“I’m so glad you’re here, Anne,” said Miss Lavendar, nibbling at her candy.  “If you weren’t I should be blue . . . very blue . . . almost navy blue.  Dreams and make-believes are all very well in the daytime and the sunshine, but when dark and storm come they fail to satisfy.  One wants real things then.  But you don’t know this . . . seventeen never knows it.  At seventeen dreams do satisfy because you think the realities are waiting for you further on.  When I was seventeen, Anne, I didn’t think forty-five would find me a white-haired little old maid with nothing but dreams to fill my life.”

“But you aren’t an old maid,” said Anne, smiling into Miss Lavendar’s wistful woodbrown eyes.  “Old maids are born . . . they don’t become.”

“Some are born old maids, some achieve old maidenhood, and some have old maidenhood thrust upon them,” parodied Miss Lavendar whimsically.

“You are one of those who have achieved it then,” laughed Anne, “and you’ve done it so beautifully that if every old maid were like you they would come into the fashion, I think.”

“I always like to do things as well as possible,” said Miss Lavendar meditatively, “and since an old maid I had to be I was determined to be a very nice one.  People say I’m odd; but it’s just because I follow my own way of being an old maid and refuse to copy the traditional pattern.  Anne, did anyone ever tell you anything about Stephen Irving and me?”

“Yes,” said Anne candidly, “I’ve heard that you and he were engaged once.”