Desire whistled over her unpacking; she could not sing, but she could whistle like a blackbird.  When her father came up on Saturday night, he said that her eyes were brighter and her cheeks were rounder, for the country air; she would take to growing pretty instead of strong-minded, if she didn’t look out.

Kenneth came round on Monday, after tea, to ask them to go over to Miss Waite’s and make acquaintance.

“For you see,” he said, “you will have to be very intimate there, and it is time to begin.  It will take one call to be introduced, and another, at least, to get up-stairs and see that beautiful breezy old room that can’t be lived in in winter, but is to be a delicious sort of camping-out for Dolly, all summer.  It is all windows and squirrel-holes and doors that won’t shut.  Everything comes in but the rain; but the roof is tight on that corner.  Even the woodbine has got tossed in through a broken upper pane, and I wouldn’t have it mended on any account.  There are swallows’ nests in the chimneys, and wrens under the gable, and humming-birds in the honeysuckle.  When Dolly gets there, it will be perfect.  It just wants her to take it all right into her heart and make one piece of it. They don’t know,—­the birds and the squirrels,—­it takes the human.  There has to be an Adam in every garden of Eden.”

Kenneth really chattered, from pure content and delight.

It did not take two visits to get up-stairs.  Miss Arabel met them heartily.  She had been a shy, timid old lady, from long neglect and humble living; but lately she had “come out in society,” Delia said.  Society had come after her, and convinced her that she could make good times for it.

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.