f the house,
ideas gathered from an old and yellow plan resurrected from the leaves
of a well-thumbed Bible brought from the dugout.

"Cedar!" he cried, "Must we bring cedar all the way from the South?
It will cost a fortune. Why not use some other wood? There are others
as beautiful."

"We will use cedar," determined Cyclona without further explanation,
and cedar they used, carved curiously in pomegranate and lily work,
very beautiful, Hugh had to acknowledge, though the expense was more
than it should have been, no matter how much money a young woman had
to throw to the birds.

"Shall we have so many windows?" he asked as Cyclona ordered window
after window, according to the old yellow plan.

"There must be no dark spot in all this house," decided Cyclona, and
when it was finished there was not. Built of stone brought from great
distances, stone of delicate pink from Tennessee, carved, wide of
door, alight with windows, it was a marvel to those who came and stood
by, watching the building of it.

"A beautiful house," they called it. "A beautiful house!"

There was no word of Seth in regard to the beautiful house that
Cyclona failed to remember.

"This is the stairway," she heard him say, "up which Celia shall trail
in her silks and her velvets. This is the threshold her little feet
shall press, and here is the low divan before a wide and sunny window
where she shall sit and thrum on her guitar."

Cyclona fashioned the threshold of marble, she built the stairway
spacious, she had the low divan carved in cedar and placed it before a
wide and sunny window in the music room. She placed there mandolins
and guitars. She ordered a piano made of cedar for the music room. She
had antique and gorgeous pillows embroidered by deft fingers for the
low divan, then went on to the bed-room of white and gold, of which
Seth had delighted to dream. She ordered pier-glasses, so many that
Hugh began to fear indeed for her sanity. She bought spindle-legged
furniture of gold and scattered it about. She covered the gold
bedstead with lace of the rarest. She hung curtains at the sunny
window, but curtains of so lacey a web that no possible ray of light
could they exclude.

"Exquisite!" exclaimed Hugh, "but must you have gold door knobs?"

"We must," answered Cyclona; and people came in wonder to look at the
beautiful house whose gold door knobs passed into one of the many
traditions of the excess of insanity displayed by the very