r's_ room," she said crisply. "Madame's orders--"

"I would suggest that Miss Gordon decide for herself what room she will
have." The lawyer's voice carried a rebuke that was not lost upon the
housekeeper. "Harkness, carry the bags upstairs and Miss Gordon and I
will follow."

So Harkness' reception line broke up; the gardener and the undergardener
and their wives following Mrs. Budge's stiff back out through the
service door while Harkness led Robin and her new guardian up the broad
stairway.

In the kitchen, for very want of strength, Mrs. Budge flopped into a
chair.

"Sixes and sevens!" she gasped. "I'll say that things _are_ just going
to sixes and sevens. I've always distrusted all lawyer-men and this one
ain't a bit different. Bringing a _girl_ here, and a cripple. Did you
ever hear the like?" She looked from one to the other of Harkness'
retainers and answered herself with the same breath. "You never did.
Don't know when I've been so flabbergasted. Mebbe she's a Forsyth but
she ain't a worth-while Forsyth. She ain't. As if a girl could step into
our boy's shoes." She sniffed audibly. "She don't take in Hannah Budge."

When Harkness appeared there was a fresh outburst and a reiteration that
Hannah Budge "wasn't going to be taken in by a piece no bigger'n a pint
of cider."

"Well, the girl's here--and hungry," Harkness retorted with meaning
abruptness.

A sense of duty never failed to spur poor Budge. She rose, now, quickly.
"Humph, like as not with everything else going to sixes and sevens that
old Chloe's forgot her turkey," and with a heavy sigh that fairly
rattled the stiff silk on her bosom she went off in search of the cook.

Robin found much difficulty in choosing her room for they all seemed
equally lovely in the perfection of their furnishings. She had stood for
a moment in the door of the south room that had been Christopher the
Third's. "Here's where they'd have put you if you were a boy," her new
guardian had told her. In spite of Mrs. Budge's efforts at cleaning and
dusting, a melancholy hung over the room and about all the boyish things
there was such a sense of waiting that Robin was glad to turn away.
Finally she decided upon a west room the windows of which overlooked the
valley and the hills beyond.

"Oh, wouldn't Jimmie love that?" she had cried, lingering in one of the
windows. "He loves hills, and doesn't that river look like a silver
ribbon tying the brown fields?"

The bedroom op