Now Anne did rise and turned the clothes back, but Lydia still knelt and shivered.
"You've been having bad dreams," said Anne. "Come in here, lovey, and Anne'll sing 'Lord Rendal.'"
"I mean," said Lydia, from her knees, "could anybody kiss me, except Farvie, and not have it like Farvie—I mean have it terrible—and I kiss him back—and—Anne, what would it mean?"
"That's a nightmare," said Anne. "Now you've got all cool and waked up, you run back to bed, unless you'll get in here."
Lydia put a fevered little hand upon her.
"Anne, you must tell me," she said, catching her breath. "Not a nightmare, a real kiss, and neither of us wanting to kiss anybody, and still doing it and not being sorry. Being glad."
She sounded so like herself in one of her fiercenesses that Anne at last believed she was wholly awake and felt a terror of her own.
"Who was it, Lydia?" she asked sternly. "Who is it you are thinking about?"
"Nobody," said Lydia, in a sudden curt withdrawal. She rose to her feet. "Yes, it was a nightmare."
She padded out of the room and softly closed the door, and Anne, left sitting there, felt unreasoning alarm. She had a moment's determination to follow her, and then she lay down again and thought achingly of Lydia who was grown up and was yet a child. And still, Anne knew, she had to come to woman's destiny. Lydia was so compact of sweetnesses that she would be courted and married, and who was Anne, to know how to marry her rightly? So she slept, after a troubled interval; but Lydia lay awake and stared the darkness through as if it held new paths to her desire. What was her desire? She did not know, save that it had all to do with Jeff. He had been cruelly used. He must not be so dealt with any more. Her passion for his well-being, germinating and growing through the years she had not seen him, had come to flower in a hot resolve that he should be happy now. And in some way, some headlong, resistless way, she knew she was to make his happiness, and yet in her allegiance to him there was trouble and pain. He had made her into a new creature. The kiss had done it.