ce, winter and
summer, came a multitude of flowers for the house--violets, lilies of
the valley, jonquils, hyacinths, tulips, and her own loved roses.

But the interior of the house was, in parts, less satisfactory. Jadwin,
so soon as his marriage was a certainty, had bought the house, and had
given over its internal furnishings to a firm of decorators. Innocently
enough he had intended to surprise his wife, had told himself that she
should not be burdened with the responsibility of selection and
planning. Fortunately, however, the decorators were men of taste. There
was nothing to offend, and much to delight in the results they obtained
in the dining-room, breakfast-room, parlors, drawing-rooms, and suites
of bedrooms. But Laura, though the beauty of it all enchanted her,
could never rid herself of a feeling that it was not hers. It impressed
her with its splendour of natural woods and dull "colour effects," its
cunning electrical devices, its mechanical contrivances for comfort,
like the ready-made luxury and "convenience" of a Pullman.

However, she had intervened in time to reserve certain of the rooms to
herself, and these--the library, her bedroom, and more especially that
apartment from whose bay windows she looked out upon the Lake, and
which, as if she were still in her old home, she called the "upstairs
sitting-room"--she furnished to suit herself.

For very long she found it difficult, even with all her resolution,
with all her pleasure in her new-gained wealth, to adapt herself to a
manner of living upon so vast a scale. She found herself continually
planning the marketing for the next day, forgetting that this now was
part of the housekeeper's duties. For months she persisted in "doing
her room" after breakfast, just as she had been taught to do in the old
days when she was a little girl at Barrington. She was afraid of the
elevator, and never really learned how to use the neat little system of
telephones that connected the various parts of the house with the
servants' quarters. For months her chiefest concern in her wonderful
surroundings took the form of a dread of burglars.

Her keenest delights were her stable and the great organ in the art
gallery; and these alone more than compensated for her uneasiness in
other particulars.

Horses Laura adored--black ones with flowing tails and manes, like
certain pictures she had seen. Nowadays, except on the rarest
occasions, she never set foot out of doors,