That settled it.  The parlor should remain as it was, Katy said, and Aunt Betsy went on with her scouring, while Helen and Katy consulted together how to make the huge feather bed seem more like the mattresses such as Morris had, and such as Mr. Cameron must be accustomed to.  Helen’s mind being the most suggestive solved the problem first, and a large comfortable was brought from the box in the garret and folded carefully over the bed, which, thus hardened and flattened, “seemed like a mattress,” Katy said, for she tried it, pronouncing it good, and feeling quite well satisfied with the room when it was finished.  And certainly it was not wholly uninviting with its snowy bed, whose covering almost swept the floor, its strip of bright carpeting in front, its vase of flowers upon the stand and its white fringed curtain sweeping back from the narrow window.

“I’d like to sleep here myself.  It looks real nice,” was Katy’s comment, while Helen offered no opinion, but followed her sister into the yard where they were to sweep the grass and prune the early September flowers.

This afforded Aunt Betsy a chance to reconnoiter and criticise, which last she did unsparingly.

“What have they done to that bed to make it look so flat?  Put on a bed-quilt, as I’m alive!  What children!  It would break my back to lie there, and this Cannon is none the youngest, accordin’ to their tell—­nigh on to thirty, if not turned.  It will make his bones ache, of course.  I am glad I know better than to treat visitors that way.  The comforter may stay, but I’ll be bound I’ll make it softer!” and stealing up the stairs, Aunt Betsy brought down a second feather bed, much lighter than the one already on, but still large enough to suggest the thought of smothering.  This she had made herself, intending it as a part of Katy’s “setting out,” should she ever marry, and as things now seemed tending that way, it was only right, she thought, that Mr. Cannon, as she called him, should begin to have the benefit of it.  Accordingly, the handiwork of the girls was destroyed, and two beds, instead of one, were placed beneath the comfortable, which Aunt Betsy permitted to remain.

“I’m mighty feared they’ll find me out,” she said, stroking, and patting, and coaxing the beds to lie down, taking great pains in the making, and succeeding so well that when her task was done there was no perceptible difference between Helen’s bed and hers, except that the latter was a few inches higher than the former, and more nearly resembled a pincushion in shape.

Carefully shutting the door, Aunt Betsy hurried away, feeling glad that her nieces were too much engaged in training a vine over a frame to afford them time for discovering what she had done.  Katy, she knew, was going to Linwood by and by, after various little things which Mrs. Lennox thought indispensable to the entertaining of so great a man as Wilford Cameron, and which the farmhouse did not possess, and as Helen too would be busy, there was not much danger of detection.