"Oh, what fun it would be to play keeping-house here, Dora!" Marjorie cried.
"Wouldn't it!" Dora answered. "Let us, Marjorie! Let us pretend it is ours, and choose our rooms, and furnish it!"
"That will be fine," Marjorie answered, fervently, and soon the little girls were deep in a most delightful air-castle.
"Let us play, too," said Will, persuasively, and Katherine answered without hesitation:
"Yes, let us! I feel just like a child here, and could play with a doll if I had one!"
"Well,—let me see; we will begin by deciding about the rooms," said Will. "Let us have this for the study,—shall we?—and put the books all along this wall opposite the windows!"
And so these two "children of a larger growth" played house with almost as much zest as Marjorie and Dora,—and greatly to the amusement and delight of the latter couple when they caught a word or two of their murmured conversation. Up-stairs were four rather small rooms with sloping ceilings, and in the middle of the house, just over the front door, a dear little room without the slope, and with a dormer-window.
"This shall be our boudoir," Dora said, as they entered, and then stopped and exclaimed in surprise, for against one wall stood a piano! Almost the ghost of a piano, or the skeleton, rather,—at the very best, a piano in the last stage of decrepitude, but still a piano. Its rosewood frame had been whittled, chopped, and generally ill-treated, and more than half its yellow keys were gone, but oh, wonder of wonders, some of those remaining gave a thin, unearthly sound when struck! It seemed almost like something alive that had been deserted, and the little group gathered around it with sympathetic exclamations.
While they were talking and wondering about it, lively voices proclaimed the approach of the twins.
"We won't say anything about our housekeeping play," said Dora, hastily, turning to Mr. Graham, and Marjorie loyally added, "except to mother."