Sylvia Crane's house was the one in which her grandmother had been born, and was the oldest house in the village.

It was known as the "old Crane place." It had never been painted, it was shedding its flapping gray shingles like gray scales, the roof sagged in a mossy hollow before the chimney, the windows and doors were awry, and the whole house was full of undulations and wavering lines, which gave it a curiously unreal look in broad daylight.

In the moonlight it was the shadowy edifice built of a dream.
As Sylvia and Charlotte came to the front door it seemed as if they might fairly walk through it as through a gray shadow; but Sylvia stooped, and her shoulders strained with seemingly incongruous force, as if she were spending it to roll away a shadow.

On the flat doorstep lay a large round stone, pushed close against the door.
There were no locks and keys in the old Crane place; only bolts.
Sylvia could not fasten the doors on the inside when she went away, so she adopted this expedient, which had been regarded with favor by her mother and grandmother before her, and illustrated natures full of gentle fallacies which went far to make existence comfortable.
Always on leaving the house alone the Crane women had bolted the side door, which was the one in common use, gone out the front one, and laboriously rolled this same round stone before it.

Sylvia reasoned as her mother and grandmother before her, with the same simplicity: "When the stone's in front of the door, folks must know there ain't anybody to home, because they couldn't put it there if they was." And when some neighbor had argued that the evil-disposed might roll away the stone and enter at will, Sylvia had replied, with the innocent conservatism with which she settled an argument, "Nobody ever did." To-night she rolled away the stone to the corner of the door-step, where it had lain through three generations when the Crane women were at home, and sighed with regret that she had defended the door with it.