“If I had gone to New York—­” and there she stopped, as if she had accidentally said what she did not intend.

“If you had gone to New York!  Why!  When?” cried Barbara.  “What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” Rosamond answered, in a vexed way.  “Mrs. Van Alstyne asked me, that is all.  Of course I couldn’t.”

“Of course you’re just a glorious old noblesse oblige-d!  Why didn’t you say something?  You might have gone perhaps.  We could all have helped.  I’d have lent you—­that garnet and white silk!”

Rosamond would not say anything more, and she would scarcely be kissed.

After all, she had co-operated more than any of us.  Rose was always the daughter who objected and then did.  I have often thought that young man in Scripture ought to have been a woman.  It is more a woman’s way.

The maples were in their gold and vermilion now, and the round masses of the ash were shining brown; we filled the vases with their leaves, and pressed away more in all the big books we could confiscate, and hunted frosted ferns in the wood-edge, and had beautiful pine blazes morning and evening in the brown room, and began to think how pleasant, for many cosey things, the winter was going to be, out here at Westover.

“How nicely we could keep Halloween,” said Ruth, “round this great open chimney!  What a row of nuts we could burn!”

“So we will,” said Rosamond.  “We’ll ask the girls.  Mayn’t we, mother?”

“To tea?”

“No.  Only to the fun,—­and some supper.  We can have that all ready in the other room.”

“They’ll see the cooking-stove.”

“They won’t know it, when they do,” said Barbara.

“We might have the table in the front room,” suggested Ruth.

“The drawing-room!” cried Rosamond.  “That would be a make-shift.  Who ever heard of having supper there?  No; we’ll have both rooms open, and a bright fire in each, and one up in mother’s room for them to take off their things.  And there’ll be the piano, and the stereoscope, and the games, in the parlor.  We’ll begin in there, and out here we’ll have the fortune tricks and the nuts later; and then the supper, bravely and comfortably, in the dining-room, where it belongs.  If they get frightened at anything, they can go home; I’m going to new cover that screen, though, mother; And I’ll tell you what with,—­that piece of goldy-brown damask up in the cedar-trunk.  And I’ll put an arabesque of crimson braid around it for a border, and the room will be all goldy-brown and crimson then, and nobody will stop to think which is brocade and which is waterproof.  They’ll be sitting on the waterproof, you know, and have the brocade to look at.  It’s just old enough to seem as if it had always been standing round somewhere.”

“It will be just the kind of party for us to have,” said Barbara.

“They couldn’t have it up there, if they tried.  It would be sure to be Marchbanksy.”