Cornelia had found a bundle of old curtains in one of the boxes; and now she brought them out, and began to measure the windows.
“The lace curtains all wore out, and mother threw them away,” volunteered Louise sadly.
“Never mind; I’ve found a lot of pretty good scrim ones here, and I’m going to wash them and stencil a pattern of wild birds across them,” said Cornelia. “They’ll do for the bedrooms, anyway. The windows are the same size all over the house, aren’t they? I have some beautiful patterns for stencilling up in my trunk that I made for some of the girls’ curtains at college.”
“How perfectly dear!” said Louise. “Can’t I go up and find them?”
“Yes, they are in the green box just under the tray. I wish we had a couple more windows in this room, it is so dark. If I were a carpenter for a little while I would knock out that partition into the hall, and saw out two windows, one each side of the fireplace over there,” said Cornelia, motioning toward the blank sidewall where already her mind had reared a lovely stone fireplace.
“There’s a carpenter lives next door,” said Louise thoughtfully. “He goes to work every morning at seven o’clock, but I suppose he would charge a lot.”
“I wonder,” said Cornelia. “We’ll have to think about that”; and she stood off in the hall, and began to look around with her eyelashes drawn down like curtains through which she was sharply watching a thought that had appeared on her mental horizon.
On the whole it was a very exciting evening, and a happy one also. When Harry and his father came home, there were two loads of stone already neatly piled inside the little yard, and Carey was just flourishing up to the door with a loud honk of the horn on his borrowed truck, bringing a third load. Harry had of course told his father the new plans, and the father had been rather dubious about such a scheme.
“He’ll just begin it, and then go off and leave a mess around,” he had told Harry with a sigh.
But, when he saw the eager light on his eldest son’s face, he took heart of hope. Carey was so lithe and alert, worked with so much precision, strength, and purpose and seemed so intent on what he was doing. Perhaps, after all, something good would come of it, although he looked with an anxious eye at the borrowed car, and wondered what he would do if Carey should break it and be liable for its price.