The effect was very good, and the resulting apartment, the only one on the lower floor which could be spared for general use, had become at once the place upon which Charlotte was concentrating most of her efforts, meaning to make it a room where everybody should wish to come.

The usual interruption of a summons for Doctor Churchill to the office in the wing sent the assembled company off again.  Just as Charlotte was leaving the room, however—­the last of all, because she could not bring herself to desert the joy of the copper panel in its setting of gray stone—­Doctor Churchill hurriedly returned.

Seeing Charlotte alone and about to vanish, he ran after her and drew her back.

“I have to go right away, dear,” he said.  “But I want to look at the new gift alone with you a minute.  It’s really a fine addition, isn’t it?”

“Oh, beautiful!  In the firelight and the lamplight how that copper will gleam!”

“I wish we knew to whom we owe such a thought of us.  I like the sentiment, too, don’t you, Charlotte?  I hope—­do you know, it’s one of my pleasantest hopes—­that our home is going to be one that knows how to dispense hospitality.  The real sort—­not the sham.”

Charlotte looked up at him and smiled.

“As if I need tell you what I wish!” he said, with gay tenderness.  “You know every thought I have about it.”

“We’ll make people happy here,” said Charlotte.  “Indeed, I want to, Andy Churchill.  This room—­they shall find a welcome always—­rich and poor.  Especially—­the poor ones.”

“Especially the poor ones.  Won’t old Mrs. Wilsey think it’s pleasant here?  And Tom Brannigan—­he’ll be scared at first, but we’ll show him it’s a jolly place—­Charlotte, I musn’t get to dreaming day-dreams now, or I never can summon strength of purpose to wait another week.  One week from to-day!  What an age it seems!”

“Run and make your calls,” advised Charlotte, laughing, as she escaped from him and hurried to the door.  “The busier you keep, the shorter the time will seem.”

The week went by at last.  To the young man, one of a large family long since scattered—­many members of it, including both father and mother, in the old Virginia churchyard—­the time could not come too soon.  He had lived alone with his housekeeper almost four years now, and during nearly all that time he had been waiting for Charlotte.

She was considerably younger than he, and when he had been, after two years of acquaintance, allowed to betroth himself to her, he had been asked to wait yet another two years while she should “grow up a little more,” as her wise father put it.

As for Charlotte herself, she still seemed to those who loved her at home hardly grown up enough at twenty-two to go to a home of her own.

Yet father and mother, brothers and sister, were all ready to acknowledge that those two years had resulted in the early budding of very sweet and womanly qualities; and nobody, watching Charlotte with her lover, could possibly fear for either that they were not ready for the great experiment.