timidly.

"A fire, when there's a furnace?"

"I mean chilly days in the fall, before we start the furnace."

"Then we could have that nice air-tight that we had in the other
house put up. If we had a fire in this old thing the heat would all
go up chimney."

"But it would look kind of pretty."

"I was brought up to think a fire was for warmth, not for looks,"
said Sylvia, tartly. She had lost the odd expression which Henry had
dimly perceived several days before, or she was able to successfully
keep it in abeyance; still, there was no doubt that a strange and
subtle change had occurred within the woman. Henry was constantly
looking at her when she spoke, because he vaguely detected unwonted
tones in her familiar voice; that voice which had come to seem almost
as his own. He was constantly surprised at a look in the familiar
eyes, which had seemed heretofore to gaze at life in entire unison
with his own.

He often turned upon Sylvia and asked her abruptly if she did not
feel well, and what was the matter; and when she replied, as she
always did, that nothing whatever was the matter, continued to regard
her with a frown of perplexity, from which she turned with a switch
of her skirts and a hitch of her slender shoulders. Sylvia, while she
still evinced exultation over her new possessions, seemed to do so
fiercely and defiantly.

When Horace Allen arrived she greeted him, and ushered him into her
new domain with a pride which had in it something almost repellent.
At supper-time she led him into the dining-room and glanced around,
then at him.

"Well," said she, "don't you think it was about time we had something
nice like this, after we had pulled and tugged for nothing all our
lives? Don't you think we deserve it if anybody does?"

"I certainly do," replied Horace Allen, warmly; yet he regarded her
with somewhat the same look of astonishment as Henry. It did not seem
to him that it could be Sylvia Whitman who was speaking. The thought
crossed his mind, as he took his place at the table, that possibly
coming late in life, after so many deprivations, good-fortune had
disturbed temporarily the even balance of her good New England sense.

Then he looked about him with delight. "I say, this is great!" he
cried, boyishly. There was something incurably boyish about Horace
Allen, although he was long past thirty. "By George, that Chippendale
sideboard is a beauty," he said, gazing across at a fine old piece
full of