. And I shall delight in having you so near."

The two descended. By the time Mrs. Kelsey's work-day was over the front
room was in order, and Charlotte, bidding good-night to her servitors,
gave them hearty praise and bade them come back early in the morning.
Ellen had gone home, bidding Charlotte follow her at convenience.

"I must run out and pick some flowers for my copper bowl," Charlotte had
said. "Then the room will be ready to show your husband this evening. I'm
anxious to have it make a good impression on him, and I've discovered
that men always notice posies."

So, out in the tangled garden she chose a great bunch of delphinium, in
mingled shadings from pale blues and lavenders to deepest sapphire tones,
and bringing it in exultingly filled the copper bowl and set it on the
old spindle-legged table opposite the fireplace. Woven rag rugs in dull
blues lay on the floor; one great winged chair, Granny's chair, stood by
the window. Besides this were the splint-bottomed, high-backed chair, two
Sheraton chairs, and a Chippendale mirror,--all relics of a luxurious old
home. Two small portraits in oil hung upon the wall, painted by some
master hand, portraits of Charlotte's parents. This was all the
furnishing the room contained, but somehow, in the warm light of
the late July afternoon, it looked anything but bare.

The Chesters, the Macauleys and the Burnses, all came across the street
in the early July evening, to view the work which had been done.
Charlotte had slipped on a thin white gown and pinned a bunch of
old-fashioned crimson-and-pink "bleeding-hearts" at her waist, to do the
occasion honour. She looked, somehow, already as if she belonged with the
place. She sat upon the doorstone and hemmed small muslin curtains which
were to go in the bedrooms upstairs, and Martha, Winifred, and Ellen,
seeing this, sent for their sewing materials and helped her, while the
daylight lasted.

Burns, looking on, hands in pockets, suddenly observed, "We fellows ought
to be doing something for her. What do you say to every man going for
a scythe and cutting the grass? No lawn mower can tackle a tangle like
this."

Macauley groaned. "Why begin to be neighbourly at such a pace? Cutting
this grass is going to be no easy task."

But Chester and Burns had already started across the street, and Macauley
was obliged to follow. By the time darkness fell the front yard had been
cropped into at least a semblance of tidiness, and