Nan stood staring. She was thinking not only about the baby and the Tenneys' feeling terribly—this Charlotte saw—but something farther behind, thinking back, and thinking keenly.
"I didn't say nothin' to nobody," Charlotte continued, "but the more I thought on't the more stirred up I got. The baby gone, an' she there all alone! So I run over. I knocked an' knocked, an' not a sound. Then, as I was turnin' away, I got a glimpse inside the kitchen winder, an' if you'll believe me there she set, hat an' all on, an' her hands full o' daffies. You know them big double daffies always come up in their grass. Well!"
Nan threw down her trowel.
"I'll go over," she said. "We'll both go."
"What I come for," Charlotte hesitated, as they crossed the grass, "was whether I better say anything to anybody."
Nan knew she meant Raven.
"No," she said, "Oh, I don't know! We can't tell till we see."
Nan remembered she had not washed the earth off her hands, and yet, though they were passing her door, she could not stop. When they came in sight of the house, there was Tira in the doorway. She had taken off her hat now, and there was no daffies in her hands. She looked so commonplace, if her height and nobility could ever be less august, that Nan felt a sudden drop in her own anxiety. Tira called to them.
"Couldn't you come in a minute? I'd be pleased to have you."
They went up the path, and when they stood at the foot of the steps, confronting her, Nan saw how she had changed. And yet not tragically: she was merely, one would have said, entirely calm, the stillest thing in that pageant of the moving day.