Fred was at the piano.  It was a poor piano, and he was a poor player who smoked his old pipe while he painstakingly fingered Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words” or the score of “The Geisha.”  But Linda loved him.

“He will putter away there, perfectly content, for an hour,” she told Harriet.  “And at ten you’ll see him starting to get Josephine.  They’re great chums—­she thinks there’s no one in the world like Daddy!”

“How are things at the office?” Harriet asked.

“Oh, just about the same!  Old Frank Judson died, you know, and of course Fred expected the A. P. desk.  But Allen had a nephew, just out of Yale, it seems, and you can imagine how poor old Fred felt when they put him in.  However, I said he wouldn’t last, and he didn’t last!  So Fred has that desk now, and of course he is tremendously pleased.”

“More money in it?” Harriet asked, practically.

“Well, there will be.  Allen hasn’t said anything about it, but Fred is sure he will.  But since Fred’s mother died, we’ve felt very much easier.  It was an expense, and it was a responsibility, too,” said Linda, with her plain, fine, unselfish face only vaguely visible to Harriet in the starlight.  “And we were about six months clearing up the final expenses.  But now, with only ourselves and the children, it makes me feel positively selfish!  I did tell Mrs. Underhill that I would try to sew regularly for the Belgians, and there’s the Red Cross, I always manage that.  But—­I know you’ll be as glad as I am, Harriet, we are really saving, at last.”

“Well, you told me so last Christmas,” Harriet said, sympathetically, “when you and Fred took the Liberty Bonds—­”

“Yes, that.  But I mean really, for our home, now.  And—­but don’t mention this, Harriet, for we are in perfect dread that someone else will have the same idea—­you know that old place we’ve been watching for years?  Well, Mr. Adams told David Davenport that he believed that it could be had for seven or eight thousand dollars, and perhaps only one thousand or fifteen hundred paid down.”

Harriet remembered the place perfectly, a shabby, fine old house on a corner, with trees and an old stable, a plot perhaps one hundred feet wide, a street flanked by new wooden houses and young trees.  Linda and Fred had wanted this house since the Sunday walk, wheeling Pip in the perambulator, when they had first seen it.

“We could do wonders with that house!” said Linda, enthusiastically.  “Not all at once.  But it has electric light in, that we know, and one bath—­”

Harriet’s thoughts had wandered.

“How’s David?”