mantel-shelf, drooping over the mirror, down pillows
of every shape and tint piled in sofa-corners. Nothing was left
undecorated. The waste-basket even wore a fat satin bow, like a pet
poodle. Every horizontal surface was encumbered with knick-knacks.

"This is where we have people come when we don't know them very well,"
said Mrs. Hawthorne, hardly concealing her pride. "We couldn't ask the
minister to come right upstairs, as we did you. How do you--"

"Mrs. Hawthorne," came hurriedly from Gerald, "I beg you will not ask me
how I like it! It is a peculiarity like--like not liking oysters. I
can't bear to be asked how I like things."

"How funny! But, then, you're different from other people, aren't you?
That's what makes you so interesting."

She preceded him into the next room, which was not so bad as the first
for the reason that, as she explained, "they hadn't yet finished with
it." He seized the occasion almost eagerly to praise the chairs.

"We found them here when we came," she informed him. "There was a good
lot of furniture of this big, bare sort; clumsy, I call it. We stored
some of it in the top rooms, but Leslie Foss begged me so to let these
stay that we just had the seats covered over with this new stuff and
left them."

When she opened the next door and stepped into the space beyond it
seemed as if her lamp had dwindled to a taper, the room was so vast. It
had nine great windows, five in an unbroken row on the front of the
house the entire width of which it occupied. Aurora's light was faintly
reflected in a polished floor; it twinkled in the myriad motionless
drops of two great crystal chandeliers.

"Ah," exclaimed Gerald in a long sigh. "This is superb!"

"Yes," she said, "but you might as well try to furnish all outdoors. You
see that we haven't done anything beyond putting up curtains. We never
use it. All those chairs along the walls are going to be regilded when
we can get them to come and fetch them. Things move awfully slowly over
here, don't they, even if you're willing to pay."

"What a ball-room!"

"Yes. Wish we could give a ball; but we only know about a dozen people.
We've got to wait till we know enough at least for two sets of a
quadrille."

She was moving across the wide floor, holding her torch-like lamp high
the better to illumine the great pale, silent emptiness. No longer
hearing his footsteps echoing behind hers, she looked over her shoulder;
whereupon he hurriedly joine