"Shall I?" he asked. "Now?"
"Oh, yes! It isn't quite dark yet, but it will be so much fun!"
"The candle's pretty short, Hilda. Do you think it will last?"
"Let me see." They bent their heads eagerly over the paper lantern.
"It isn't very long, is it Les? I guess we'd better put in a new one. There are lots of them at the cottage."
And before he could protest she was flying off.
On the screened porch she found the entire household assembled. Mrs. Needham had completed her session with Eliza and was now pleasantly rocking. Ah, there was a rhythm in her rocking—especially of late years. It was the sort of rhythm the vers librists have so entirely broken away from. It was a rocking which rarely went slower or faster. Perhaps it was the Homeric hexameter. Or it was stately blank verse, with maybe the quaint rhyming couplets of Crabbe and Cowper. No one could ever think of mistaking it for Edgar Lee Masters!
Louise had come out also. Hilda, as she flew by and on into the cottage, saw her sister sitting beside Lynndal Barry on a rocking settee. There was, as a matter of fact, not a single stationary piece of furniture on the porch. To Anna Needham, rocking was pleasant and even actually profitable. To her husband—well, to the Rev. Needham it seemed a kind of muscular necessity. And the girls had always been used to it. So all the chairs rocked.