After a moment of breathless silence the Winnebagos found their voices and broke into admiring cries. Hinpoha promptly went into raptures.
“Why, you can almost smell those roses, they’re so natural! Oh, the darling archway! Did you ever see anything so beautiful? Don’t you just long to go through it? O why did your uncle ever have that horrible old shutter put over it?”
“Maybe he was afraid it would get broken,” suggested Gladys.
“But why would he put the shutter on the inside?” asked Sahwah shrewdly. “There would be more danger of the window’s getting broken from the outside than from the inside, I should think.”
“There wouldn’t be with Slim around,” said the captain, and prudently barricaded himself behind a bookcase in the corner. Slim gave him a withering glance, but did not deign to follow him and open an attack. He could not have squeezed in behind the bookcase, so he ignored the thrust.
“I wonder why he didn’t put shutters on the other windows also,” said Katherine.
“Mercy, I’m glad he didn’t!” said Nyoda with a shiver, eyeing the ugly screw holes in the smooth mahogany casement with housewifely horror at such marring of beauty. “One set of holes like that is enough. Isn’t it just like a man, though, to put screws into that woodwork! It’s time a woman owned this house. A few more generations of eccentric bachelors and the place would be ruined.”
“But,” said Sahwah musingly, “didn’t you tell us once that this house was the pride of your uncle’s heart, and he never would let any children in for fear they would scratch the floors and furniture?”
“That’s so, too,” replied Nyoda. “Uncle Jasper was so fond of this house that it was a byword among the relations. He loved it as though it were his own child. How he ever allowed anyone to put screws into that mahogany casement is a mystery.”
“Don’t you think,” said Sahwah shrewdly, “that there must have been some great and important reason for putting up that shutter? A reason that made him forget all about the holes he was making in the woodwork?”