The two men took out pencils and foot rules, and went around measuring and figuring. Elizabeth watched them with bright, attentive eyes, putting a whispered suggestion now and then to her brother.
"They can't go up and down a ladder all the time," she whispered. "There ought to be some rough stairs with a railing, at least as good as our back stairs at home."
"How about it?" said Graham aloud to the contractor. "Can you put in some steps, just rough ones, to the left? I'm going to have a party out here camping for a while this summer, and I want it to be safe. Need a railing, you know, so nobody will get a fall."
The man measured the space up with his eye.
"Just want plain steps framed up with a hand-rail?" he said, squinting up again. "Guess we better start 'em up this way to the back wall and then turn back from a landing. That'll suit the overhead space best. Just pine, you want 'em, I s'pose?"
Elizabeth stood like a big blue bird alighted on the door-sill, watching and listening. She was a regular woman, and saw big possibilities in the building. She would have enjoyed ordering parquetry flooring and carved newel-posts and making a regular palace.
The sun was setting behind the purply hill and sending a glint from the weather-vane on the little white church spire when they started back to the city. Elizabeth looked wistfully toward it, and wondered about the rapt expression on Shirley's face when she spoke of "working" in the church. How could one get any pleasure out of that? She meant to find out. At present her life was rather monotonous, and she longed to have some new interests.
That night after she had gone to her luxurious little couch she lay in her downy nest, and tried to think how it would be to live in that big barn and go to sleep up in the loft, lying on that hay. Then suddenly the mystery of life was upon her with its big problems. Why, for instance, was she born into the Graham family with money and culture and all the good times, and that sweet, bright Carol-girl born into the Hollister family where they had a hard time to live at all?
CHAPTER IX
Quite early the next morning Sidney Graham was in his office at the telephone. He conferred with the carpenter, agreeing to meet him out at the barn and make final arrangements about the windows in a very short time. Then he called up the trolley company and the electric company, and made arrangements with them to have a wire run from the road to his barn, with a very satisfactory agreement whereby he could pay them a certain sum for the use of as much light as he needed. This done, he called up an electrician, and arranged that he should send some men out that morning to wire the barn.