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Toward the last of February her father came over at dusk. Annie ran to the door, and he entered. He looked unkempt and dejected. He did not say much, but sat down and looked about him with a half-angry, half-discouraged air. Annie went out into the kitchen and broiled some beefsteak, and creamed some potatoes, and made tea and toast. Then she called him into the sitting-room, and he ate like one famished.

“Your sister Susan does the best she can,” he said, when he had finished, “and lately Jane has been trying, but they don’t seem to have the knack. I don’t want to urge you, Annie, but –“

“You know when I am married you will have to get on without me,” Annie said, in a low voice.

“Yes, but in the mean time you might, if you were home, show Susan and Jane.”

“Father,” said Annie, “you know if I came home now it would be just the same as it was before. You know if I give in and break my word with myself to stay away a year what they will think and do.”

“I suppose they might take advantage,” admitted Silas, heavily. “I fear you have always given in to them too much for their own good.”

“Then I shall not give in now,” said Annie, and she shut her mouth tightly.

There came a peal of the cracked door-bell, and Silas started with a curious, guilty look. Annie regarded him sharply. “Who is it, father?”

“Well, I heard Imogen say to Eliza that she thought it was very foolish for them all to stay over there and have the extra care and expense, when you were here.”

“You mean that the girls –?”

“I think they did have a little idea that they might come here and make you a little visit –“

Annie was at the front door with a bound. The key turned in the lock and a bolt shot into place. Then she returned to her father, and her face was very white.

“You did not lock your door against your own sisters?” he gasped.

“God forgive me, I did.”

The bell pealed again. Annie stood still, her mouth quivering in a strange, rigid fashion. The curtains in the dining-room windows were not drawn. Suddenly one window showed full of her sisters’ faces. It was Susan who spoke.

“Annie, you can’t mean to lock us out?” Susan’s face looked strange and wild, peering in out of the dark. Imogen’s handsome face towered over her shoulder.

“We think it advisable to close our house and make you a visit,” she said, quite distinctly through the glass.

Then Jane said, with an inaudible sob, “Dear Annie, you can’t mean to keep us out!”

Annie looked at them and said not a word. Their half-commanding, half-imploring voices continued a while. Then the faces disappeared.

Annie turned to her father. “God knows if I have done right,” she said, “but I am doing what you have taken me to account for not doing.”

“Yes, I know,” said Silas. He sat for a while silent. Then he rose, kissed Annie — something he had seldom done — and went home. After he had gone Annie sat down and cried. She did not go to bed that night. The cat jumped up in her lap, and she was glad of that soft, purring comfort. It seemed to her as if she had committed a great crime, and as if she had suffered martyrdom. She loved her father and her sisters with such intensity that her heart groaned with the weight of pure love. For the time it seemed to her that she loved them more than the man whom she was to marry. She sat there and held herself, as with chains of agony, from rushing out into the night, home to them all, and breaking her vow.

It was never quite so bad after that night, for Annie compromised. She baked bread and cake and pies, and carried them over after nightfall and left them at her father’s door. She even, later on, made a pot of coffee, and hurried over with it in the dawn-light, always watching behind a corner of a curtain until she saw an arm reached out for it. All this comforted Annie, and, moreover, the time was drawing near when she could go home.