you know,—­just what I’ve always wanted a house for.  I tell you, Chris, you and Tom Innis shall have latch-keys just like mine, and there is a capital chamber there at the head of the stairs, so that you can be free to come and go.  And here now’s the library,—­fancy this full of books and engravings from the ceiling to the floor; here you shall come just as you please and ask no questions,—­all the same as if it were your own, you know.”

“And Sophie, what will she say to all this?”

“Why, you know Sophie is a prime friend to both of you, and a capital girl to keep things going.  Oh, Sophie’ll make a house of this, you may depend!”

A day or two after, Bill dragged me stumbling over boxes and through straw and wrappings to show me the glories of the parlor-furniture,—­with which he teemed pleased as a child with a new toy.

“Look here,” he said; “see these chairs, garnet-colored satin, with a pattern on each; well, the sofa’s just like them, and the curtains to match, and the carpets made for the floor with centrepieces and borders.  I never saw anything more magnificent in my life.  Sophie’s governor furnishes the house, and everything is to be A No. 1, and all that, you see.  Messrs. Curtain and Collamore are coming to make the rooms up, and her mother is busy as a bee getting us in order.”

“Why, Bill,” said I, “you are going to be lodged like a prince.  I hope you’ll be able to keep it up; but law-business comes in rather slowly at first, old fellow.”

“Well, you know it isn’t the way I should furnish, if my capital was the one to cash the bills; but then, you see, Sophie’s people do it, and let them,—­a girl doesn’t want to come down out of the style she has always lived in.”

I said nothing, but had an oppressive presentiment that social freedom would expire in that house, crushed under a weight of upholstery.

But there came in due time the wedding and the wedding-reception, and we all went to see Bill in his new house splendidly lighted up and complete from top to toe, and everybody said what a lucky fellow he was; but that was about the end of it, so far as our visiting was concerned.  The running in, and dropping in, and keeping latch-keys, and making informal calls, that had been forespoken, seemed about as likely as if Bill had lodged in the Tuileries.

Sophie, who had always been one of your snapping, sparkling, busy sort of girls, began at once to develop her womanhood, and show her principles, and was as different from her former self as your careworn, mousing old cat is from your rollicking, frisky kitten.  Not but that Sophie was a good girl.  She had a capital heart, a good, true womanly one, and was loving and obliging; but still she was one of the desperately painstaking, conscientious sort of women whose very blood, as they grow older, is devoured with anxiety, and she came of a race of women in whom house-keeping was more than an art or a science,—­it