“Oh! I don’t know,” she laughed, a little embarrassed. “It just seemed to me practical, I suppose. I don’t see why people should always live over their kitchens. Then you can have the kitchen and the servants all on one floor, out of the way.”
“Corking!” cried Joe. “By Jove, I’ll do it.”
“May I make a mark?” she ventured, picking up his pencil.
“Anywhere you like—all over it, if you wish,” he declared eagerly.
They watched her—Enoch with grim delight, Joe in silent ecstasy, every mark of his pencil that her little hand made dear to him—while she crossed out the top floor partitions, indicating the new roof kitchen and the arrangement for the servants’ rooms, with so much clever ingenuity and womanly common sense that Enoch regarded her with pride and amazement.
“There! Will that do?” she laughed, as she laid aside his pencil—warm from the pressure of her fingers—a pencil which Joe seized the moment they had gone, and kept in hiding in his top bureau drawer.
“Do? I should think it would do. It’s glorious,” cried Joe. The marks her pencil had made were precious to him now.
“What a wonderful housekeeper you would make, my dear,” declared Enoch.
But she only flushed a little in reply and slipped deftly from the high stool before either Joe or Enoch could assist her.
A few moments later they were gone, and Joe returned to the throne her trim little figure had abandoned and “got to work.” That is, he sat on his high stool and, with his chin in his hands, dreamed over every tender line she had drawn, but it was not architecture that absorbed his thoughts.