so that they couldn't hurt you, and yet not stuffed so much that they
couldn't come alive again.

It was all of a week before they could begin. There is a kind of feeling
you have to have about an adventure without which the affair doesn't
come off properly. Anybody who has been much by himself in the woods has
had it; or sometime, when you are all alone in the house, all at once
there comes a kind of pricking of your skin and a tightness in your
chest, not at all unpleasant, and a kind of feeling that the furniture
has its eye on you, or that some one behind your shoulder is about to
speak, and immediately after that something happens. Or you feel sure it
would have happened if somebody hadn't interrupted.

Dorcas Jane _never_ had feelings like that. But about a week after
Oliver had proposed to her that they spend a part of the night in the
long gallery, he was standing in front of the Buffalo case, wondering
what actually did happen when a buffalo caught you. Quite unexpectedly,
deep behind the big bull's glassy eye, he caught a gleam as of another
eye looking at him, meaningly, and with a great deal of friendliness.
Oliver felt prickles come out suddenly all over his body, and without
quite knowing why, he began to move away from that place, tip-toe and
slippingly, like a wild creature in the woods when it does not know who
may be about. He told himself it would never do to have the animals come
alive without Dorcas Jane, and before all those stupid, staring folk who
might come in at any minute and spoil everything.

That night, after their father had gone off clanking to his furnaces,
Dorcas heard her brother tapping on the partition between their rooms,
as he did sometimes when they played "prisoner." She knew exactly what
he meant by it and tapped back that she was ready.