The girl’s eyes danced. “You’re all of you the same, the very same; not one of the three has changed.”
Charlotte beamed. She took it with undisguised pleasure that she had not changed.
King came round the house. He had taken the mules to the stable. “I’m holding you to that bargain,” he reminded Alexina.
Molly looked bored. Such things were only playful and interesting as she was part of them. Then she said she was tired, evidently having no mind for a morning with Mrs. Leroy.
“You shall go up and lie down in my room,” said Charlotte.
The three women went in. The hall dividing the house was wide and high, its floor of boards a foot wide, and bare but for a central strip of carpet; an old mahogany hat-tree stood against one wall, a mahogany sofa against the other, with straight backed chairs flanking both. It was all labouriously clean and primly bare.
The rooms up-stairs were big, with old mahogany furniture set squarely about them.
“They didn’t want me to bring the furniture, Willy and his father, when we came,” Charlotte told Alexina; “it cost more to get it here than to buy new, but I didn’t want new; I wanted this.”
Everything was innocent of covers or hangings, nor were there any pictures. She explained this.
“I don’t know how to drive nails,” she told them, “and Willy and the Captain don’t care. Willy had the house papered this fall in case of people coming about buying, and the papering men took the nails out the walls and he won’t bother to put them in. They’re all in here.”