wifely fashion.

With those two there was never anything like an explicit
reconciliation. They simply ignored a quarrel; and Mrs. Lapham had
only to say a few days after at breakfast, "I guess the girls would
like to go round with you this afternoon, and look at the new house,"
in order to make her husband grumble out as he looked down into his
coffee-cup. "I guess we better all go, hadn't we?"

"Well, I'll see," she said.

There was not really a great deal to look at when Lapham arrived on the
ground in his four-seated beach-wagon. But the walls were up, and the
studding had already given skeleton shape to the interior. The floors
were roughly boarded over, and the stairways were in place, with
provisional treads rudely laid. They had not begun to lath and plaster
yet, but the clean, fresh smell of the mortar in the walls mingling
with the pungent fragrance of the pine shavings neutralised the
Venetian odour that drew in over the water. It was pleasantly shady
there, though for the matter of that the heat of the morning had all
been washed out of the atmosphere by a tide of east wind setting in at
noon, and the thrilling, delicious cool of a Boston summer afternoon
bathed every nerve.

The foreman went about with Mrs. Lapham, showing her where the doors
were to be; but Lapham soon tired of this, and having found a pine
stick of perfect grain, he abandoned himself to the pleasure of
whittling it in what was to be the reception-room, where he sat looking
out on the street from what was to be the bay-window. Here he was
presently joined by his girls, who, after locating their own room on
the water side above the music-room, had no more wish to enter into
details than their father.

"Come and take a seat in the bay-window, ladies," he called out to
them, as they looked in at him through the ribs of the wall. He
jocosely made room for them on the trestle on which he sat.

They came gingerly and vaguely forward, as young ladies do when they
wish not to seem to be going to do a thing they have made up their
minds to do. When they had taken their places on their trestle, they
could not help laughing with scorn, open and acceptable to their
father; and Irene curled her chin up, in a little way she had, and
said, "How ridiculous!" to her sister.

"Well, I can tell you what," said the Colonel, in fond enjoyment of
their young ladyishness, "your mother wa'n't ashamed to sit with me on
a trestle when I called her ou