“I think maybe he’ll like a fire in it sometimes,” he said, timidly.

“A fire, when there’s a furnace?”

“I mean chilly days in the fall, before we start the furnace.”

“Then we could have that nice air-tight that we had in the other house put up.  If we had a fire in this old thing the heat would all go up chimney.”

“But it would look kind of pretty.”

“I was brought up to think a fire was for warmth, not for looks,” said Sylvia, tartly.  She had lost the odd expression which Henry had dimly perceived several days before, or she was able to successfully keep it in abeyance; still, there was no doubt that a strange and subtle change had occurred within the woman.  Henry was constantly looking at her when she spoke, because he vaguely detected unwonted tones in her familiar voice; that voice which had come to seem almost as his own.  He was constantly surprised at a look in the familiar eyes, which had seemed heretofore to gaze at life in entire unison with his own.

He often turned upon Sylvia and asked her abruptly if she did not feel well, and what was the matter; and when she replied, as she always did, that nothing whatever was the matter, continued to regard her with a frown of perplexity, from which she turned with a switch of her skirts and a hitch of her slender shoulders.  Sylvia, while she still evinced exultation over her new possessions, seemed to do so fiercely and defiantly.

When Horace Allen arrived she greeted him, and ushered him into her new domain with a pride which had in it something almost repellent.  At supper-time she led him into the dining-room and glanced around, then at him.

“Well,” said she, “don’t you think it was about time we had something nice like this, after we had pulled and tugged for nothing all our lives?  Don’t you think we deserve it if anybody does?”

“I certainly do,” replied Horace Allen, warmly; yet he regarded her with somewhat the same look of astonishment as Henry.  It did not seem to him that it could be Sylvia Whitman who was speaking.  The thought crossed his mind, as he took his place at the table, that possibly coming late in life, after so many deprivations, good-fortune had disturbed temporarily the even balance of her good New England sense.

Then he looked about him with delight.  “I say, this is great!” he cried, boyishly.  There was something incurably boyish about Horace Allen, although he was long past thirty.  “By George, that Chippendale sideboard is a beauty,” he said, gazing across at a fine old piece full of dull high lights across its graceful surfaces.

Sylvia colored with pleasure, but she had been brought up to disclaim her possessions to others than her own family.  “Mrs. Jim Jones has got a beautiful one she bought selling Calkin’s soap,” she said.  “She thinks it’s prettier than this, and I must say it’s real handsome.  It’s solid oak and has a looking-glass on it.  This hasn’t got any glass.”