me."

"You have excellent taste," said she demurely, "but I never should
credit you with the discriminations and fastidiousnesses of a decorator.
And why should you want to take away from me the happiness of making my
own nest? Don't you know it's the home-maker who finds most joy in the
home? Yet--it's the home-comer I want to have find the joy. Do you think
you can rest in this room, Red?"

He drew a deep, contented breath. "Every minute I am in it. And from
the time I first begin to think about it, coming toward it. Home! It's
Paradise! This great, deep, all-embracing blue thing we're sitting in--is
it made of down and velvet?"

"Precisely that. Velvet to cover it, down in the pillows. I hope you'll
have many a splendid nap here."

"You'll spoil me," he declared, "if you let me sleep here. I'm used to
catching forty winks in my old leather chair in the office, while I wait
for a summons."

Her face grew very tender. "I know. James Macauley has told me more than
one tale of hours spent there, when you needed sounder sleep. It's a hard
life, and it's going to be my delight to try to make it easier."

Red Pepper sat up. "It's not a hard life, dear,--it's one of many
compensations. And now that I have one permanent compensation I'm
never going to think I'm being badly used, no matter what goes wrong.
Come, let's stroll about. I want to look at every separate thing. This
piano--surely the sum I gave you didn't cover that? It looks like one of
the sort that are not bought two-for-a-quarter."

"No, Red, that was mine. It came from my old home with Aunt Lucy--that
and the desk-bookcase, and two of the chairs. And Aunt Lucy gave me this
big rug, made from the old drawing-room carpet. I built the whole room on
the rug colourings. You don't mind, do you, dear?--my using these few
things that belonged to me in my girlhood, in South Carolina?"

"In your girlhood? Not--in your Washington life?"

"No, Red."

She looked straight up into his eyes, reading in the sudden glowing of
them under their heavy brows the feeling he could not conceal that he
could bear to have about his house no remote suggestion of her former
marriage.

"All right, dearest," he answered quickly. "I'm a brute, I know,
but--you're mine now. Will you play for me? I believe I'm fond of music."

"Of course you are. But first, let's go upstairs. I'm almost as proud of
our guest-rooms as of this."

"Guest-rooms?" repeated Burns, a few minutes later,