"And I know I would like to have her. I'll go down to Mr. Clowrie's to-morrow, and make her hunt me up a cook and housemaid, and stableman. I shall want a gardener, too—that's another thing I forgot."
"Old Nettleby will do that. I say, Olly, you ought to give us a house-warming."
"I mean to; but they never can dance in these little rooms. Oh, how nice it is to have a house of one's own!"
Laura wondered at the morbid earnestness of Miss Henderson on this subject. She knew very little of the prior history of the heiress, beyond that from great wealth she had fallen to great poverty, and had had unpleasant experience in New York boarding-houses; the probable origin of this desperate heart-sick longing for a house of her own—a home where she would be the mistress, the sovereign queen.
Mrs. Hill, the pilot's widow, was very glad of Miss Henderson's offer, and gratefully closed with it at once. Perhaps the bread of dependence, never very sweet, was unusually bitter, when sliced by the fair hand of Miss Catty. She was a tall, portly old lady, with a fair, pleasing, unwrinkled face, and kindly blue eyes, that had a motherly tenderness in them for the rich young orphan girl.
"And I want you to find me a cook, and a groom, and a housemaid, Mrs. Hill," Olive said; "and the girl must be pretty. I mean to have nothing but pretty things about me. I am going to the cottage on Monday, and you must have them all before then."
Mrs. Hill was a treasure of a housekeeper. Before Saturday night she had engaged a competent cook, whose husband knew all about horses, and took the place of groom and coachman. She got, too, a chambermaid, with a charmingly pretty face and form; and the new window-draperies of snowy lace and purple satin were festooned from their gilded cornices; and the new furniture was arranged; and the new pictures, lonely little landscape-scenes, hung around the walls. It was a perfect little bijou of a cottage, and the heiress danced from room to room on Monday morning with the glee of a happy child delighted with its new toy, and hugged Laura at least a dozen times over.
"Oh, Laura, Laura, how happy I am! and how happy I am going to be here! I feel as if this great big world were all sunshine and beauty, and I were the happiest mortal in it!"
"Yes, dear," said Laura, "but don't strangle me, if you can help it. The rooms are beautiful, and your dear five hundred are dying to behold them. When does that house-warming come off?"
Miss Henderson was whirling round and round like a crazy teetotum, and now stopped before Miss Blair with a sweeping courtesy that ballooned her dress all out around her.