e is large enough for such a queen of a woman?
Won't her throne take up the whole of the first floor?"

Then she was gone up the diminutive staircase, and her light footsteps
could be heard on the bare floors overhead. Left alone, Anthony Robeson
stood still for a moment looking fixedly at the door by which she had
gone. The smile with which he had answered her gay fling had faded; his
eyes had grown dark with a singular fire; his hands were clenched.
Suddenly he strode across the floor and stopped by the door. He was
looking down at the quaint old latch which served instead of a knob. Then,
with a glance at the unconscious back of Mrs. Dingley, sitting sleepily on
the little porch outside, he stooped and pressed his lips upon the iron
where Juliet's hand had lain.

III.--SHOPPING WITH A CHAPERON

"Five hundred dollars," mused Miss Marcy, on the Boston train next
morning. "Six rooms--living-room, dining-room, kitchen, and three
bedrooms. That's----"

"You forget," warned Anthony Robeson from the seat where he faced Juliet
and Mrs. Dingley. "That must cover the outside painting and repairs. You
can't figure on having more than three hundred dollars left for the
inside."

"Dear me, yes," frowned Juliet. She held Anthony's plan in her hand, and
her tablets and pencil lay in her lap. "Well, I can spend fifty dollars on
each room--only some will need more than others. The living-room will take
the most--no, the dining-room."

"The kitchen will take the most," suggested Mrs. Dingley. "Your range will
use up the most of your fifty. And kitchen utensils count up very
rapidly."

"It will be a very small range," Anthony said. "A little toy stove would
be more practical for our--the kitchen. How big is it, Juliet?"

"'Ten by fourteen,'" read Juliet. "From the centre of the room you can hit
all the side walls with the broom. Speaking of walls, Tony--those must be
our first consideration. If we get our colour scheme right everything else
will follow. I have it all in my head."

So it proved. But it also proved, when they had been hard at work for an
hour at a well-known decorator's, that the tints and designs for which
Miss Marcy asked were not readily to be found in the low-priced
wall-papers to which Anthony rigidly held her.

"I must have the softest, most restful greens for the living-room," she
announced. "There--_that_----"

"But that is a dollar a roll," whispered Anthony.

"Then--_that_!"

"Eighty-fi