"More money in it?" Harriet asked, practically.
"Well, there will be. Allen hasn't said anything about it, but Fred is sure he will. But since Fred's mother died, we've felt very much easier. It was an expense, and it was a responsibility, too," said Linda, with her plain, fine, unselfish face only vaguely visible to Harriet in the starlight. "And we were about six months clearing up the final expenses. But now, with only ourselves and the children, it makes me feel positively selfish! I did tell Mrs. Underhill that I would try to sew regularly for the Belgians, and there's the Red Cross, I always manage that. But--I know you'll be as glad as I am, Harriet, we are really saving, at last."
"Well, you told me so last Christmas," Harriet said, sympathetically, "when you and Fred took the Liberty Bonds--"
"Yes, that. But I mean really, for our home, now. And--but don't mention this, Harriet, for we are in perfect DREAD that someone else will have the same idea--you know that old place we've been watching for years? Well, Mr. Adams told David Davenport that he believed that it could be had for seven or eight thousand dollars, and perhaps only one thousand or fifteen hundred paid down."
Harriet remembered the place perfectly, a shabby, fine old house on a corner, with trees and an old stable, a plot perhaps one hundred feet wide, a street flanked by new wooden houses and young trees. Linda and Fred had wanted this house since the Sunday walk, wheeling Pip in the perambulator, when they had first seen it.
"We could do wonders with that house!" said Linda, enthusiastically. "Not all at once. But it has electric light in, that we know, and one bath--"
Harriet's thoughts had wandered.
"How's David?"
"Lovely. He always comes to us for Sunday dinner," Linda said. "And he always asks for you!" she added, with some significance. David Davenport, Fred's somewhat heavy and plodding brother, a successful Brooklyn dentist, had never made any secret of his feeling for the beautiful Harriet. "David is a dear," his sister-in-law said, "the most comfortable person to have about! And he is doing remarkably well. He is going to make some woman very happy, Harriet. He and Fred both have that--well, that domestic quality that wears pretty well! We've promised to give the children a picnic on the ocean a week from Sunday, and you'd be perfectly touched to see how David is planning for it. We're to spend Saturday night with him--"
"I like David!" Harriet said, in answer to some faint indication of reproach in her sister's tone. But immediately afterward she added, in a lower voice: "Ward Carter has had Royal Blondin at the house this week!"