“I’m sorry I lost my temper,” said she, after they had sat a while in silence enjoying the ameliorating influence of the blaze, “but I do hate a humbug.  We will let this stove stand here all summer to remind you that neither your house nor your wife is perfect, and to keep me warm when the east wind blows.”

[Illustration:  WARMTH UNDER THE WINDOW.]

Jack’s response to this magnanimous remark must be omitted, as it had no direct bearing upon house-building.

“When I went into the kitchen this morning to get warm,” Jill observed later in the evening, “I found Bridget ironing; the stove was red-hot, the bath boiler was bubbling and shaking with the imprisoned steam, and the outside door was wide open.  It struck me that there was heat enough going out of doors, not to mention the superheated air of the kitchen itself, to have made the whole house comfortable such days as this, if it could only be saved.  Don’t you think it would be possible to attach a pipe to some part of the cooking-range that would carry steam or hot water to the front of the house.  We shouldn’t want it when the furnace was running, nor in very warm weather, and at such times it could be turned off.”

Jack thought it could be done, and expressed a willingness to be a roasted martyr occasionally if he could by that means make some use of the perennial fire in the kitchen, a fire that seemed to be the hottest when there was no demand for it.

[Illustration:  STEAM PIPES BESIDE THE FIREPLACE.]

“It’s my conviction,” said he, “that if the heat actually evolved from the fuel consumed by the average cook could be conserved on strictly scientific principles, it would warm the house comfortably the year round without any damage to the cooking, and with a saving of all the bother of stoves, fireplaces and furnaces.”  And his conviction was well founded, provided the house is not too large and the weather is not too cold.  “Shall we try it in the new house?”

“No, not unless somebody invents a new patent low-pressure, automatic-cooking-range-warming-attachment before we are ready for it.  We shall have fireplaces in every room—­real ones—­and steam radiators beside.”

“What! in every room, those ugly, black, bronzy, oily, noisy, leaking, sizzling, snapping steam radiators that are always in the way and keep the air in the room so dry that everybody has catarrh, the doors won’t latch, and the furniture falls to pieces?  You know how the old heirloom mahogany chair collapsed under Madam Abigail at Mrs. Hunter’s party—­went to pieces in a twinkling like the one-horse shay—­and all on account of the steam heat.”