Part 31 (2/2)

She brought out currant wine and gave them, the first thing; and when Kenneth told her that they were his and Dorris's friends, and were coming next week to see about getting ready for her, she took them right round through all four of the ground rooms, to the queer corner staircase, and up into the ”long west chamber,” to show them what a rackety old place it was, and to see whether they supposed it could be made fit.

”Why it's like the Romance of the Forest!” said Helena, delighted.

”I wish _we_ had come here. Don't you have ghosts, or robbers, or something, up and down those stairs, Miss Waite?” For she had spied a door that led directly out of the room, from beside the chimney, up into the rambling old garret, smelling of pine boards and penny-royal.

”No; nothing but squirrels and bees, and sometimes a bat,” answered Miss Arabel.

”Well, it doesn't want fixing. If you fix it, you will spoil it. I shall come here and sleep with Dorris,--see if I don't.”

The floor was bare, painted a dark, marbled gray. In the middle was a great braided rug, of blue and scarlet and black. The walls were pale gray, with a queer, stencilled scroll-and-dash border of vermilion and black paint.

There was an old, high bedstead, with carved frame and posts, bare of drapery; an antiquated chest of drawers; and a half-circular table with tall, plain, narrow legs, between two of the windows.

There was a corner cupboard, and a cupboard over the chimney. The doors of these, and the high wainscot around the room, were stained in old-fas.h.i.+oned ”imitation mahogany,” very streaky and red. The wainscot was so heavily finished that the edge running around the room might answer for a shelf.

”Just curtains, and toilet covers, and a little low rocking chair,”

said Mrs. Ledwith. ”That is all you want.”

”But the windows are so high,” suggested Desire. ”A low chair would bury her up, away from all the pleasantness. I'll tell you what I would have, Mr. Kincaid. A kind of dais, right across that corner, to take in two windows; with a carpet on it, and a chair, and a little table.”

”Just the thing!” said Kenneth. ”That is what I wanted you for, Miss Desire,” he said in a pleased, gentle way, lowering his tone to her especial hearing, as he stood beside her in the window.

And Desire was very happy to have thought of it.

Helena was spurred by emulation to suggest something.

”I'd have a--hammock--somewhere,” she said.

”Good,” said Kenneth. ”That shall be out under the great b.u.t.ternut.”

The great b.u.t.ternut walled in one of the windows with a wilderness of green, and the squirrels ran chattering up and down the brown branches, and peeping in all day. In the autumn, when the nuts were ripe, they would be scrambling over the roof, and in under the eaves, to hide their stores in the garret, Miss Arabel told them.

”Why doesn't everbody have an old house, and let the squirrels in?”

cried Helena, in a rapture.

In ten days more,--the first week of June,--Dorris came.

Well,--”That let in all the rest,” Helena said, and Desire, may be, thought. ”We shan't have it to ourselves any more.”

The girls could all come down and call on Dorris Kincaid, and they did.

But Desire and Helena had the first of it; n.o.body else went right up into her room; n.o.body else helped her unpack and settle. And she was so delighted with all that they had done for her.

The dais was large enough for two or three to sit upon at once, and it was covered with green carpet of a small, mossy pattern, and the window was open into the b.u.t.ternut on one side, and into the honeysuckle on the other, and it was really a bower.

”I shall live ten hours in one,” said Dorris.

”And you'll let me come and sleep with you some night, and hear the bats,” said Helena.

The Ledwiths made a good link; they had known the Kincaids so well; if it had been only Dorris, alone, with her brother there, the Westover girls might have been shy of coming often. Since Kenneth had been at Miss Waite's, they had already grown a little less free of the beautiful woods that they had just found out and begun fairly to enjoy last autumn.

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