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Nobody knows the comfort that we Holabirds took, though, in those autumn days, after all this was over, in our home; feeling every bright, comfortable minute, that our home was our own.  “It is so nice to have it to love grandfather by,” said Ruth, like a little child.

“Everything is so pleasant,” said Barbara, one sumptuous morning.  “I’ve so many nice things that I can choose among to do.  I feel like a bee in a barrel of sugar.  I don’t know where to begin.”  Barbara had a new dress to make; she had also a piece of worsted work to begin; she had also two new books to read aloud, that Mrs. Scherman had brought up from Boston.

We felt rich in much prospectively; we could afford things better now; we had proposed and arranged a book-club; Miss Pennington and we were to manage it; Mrs. Scherman was to purchase for us.  Ruth was to have plenty of music.  Life was full and bright to us, this golden autumn-time, as it had never been before.  The time itself was radiant; and the winter was stored beforehand with pleasures; Arctura was as glad as anybody; she hears our readings in the afternoons, when she can come up stairs, and sit mending stockings or hemming aprons.

We knew, almost for the first time, what it was to be without any pressure of anxiety.  We dared to look round the house and see what was wearing out.  We could replace things—­some, at any rate—­as well as not; so we had the delight of choosing, and the delight of putting by; it was a delicious perplexity.  We all felt like Barbara’s bee; and when she said that once she said it for every day, all through the new and happy time.

It was wonderful how little there was, after all, that we did want in any hurry.  We thought it over.  We did not care to carpet the dining-room; we liked the drugget and the dark wood-margins better.  It came down pretty nearly, at last, so far as household improvements were concerned, to a new broadcloth cover for the great family table in the brown-room.

Barbara’s bee-havior, however, had its own queer fluctuations at this time, it must be confessed.  Whatever the reason was, it was not altogether to be depended on.  It had its alternations of humming content with a good deal of whimsical bouncing and buzzing and the most unpredictable flights.  To use a phrase of Aunt Trixie’s applied to her childhood, but coming into new appropriateness now, Barbara “acted like a witch.”

She began at the wedding.  Only a minute or two before Leslie came down, Harry Goldthwaite moved over to where she stood just a little apart from the rest of us, by the porch door, and placed himself beside her, with some little commonplace word in a low tone, as befitted the hushed expectancy of the moment.