“I don’t wonder,” laughed Harlan. “That is,” he added hastily, “he couldn’t have been pleased to see you doing it all by yourself. Anybody would love to see a mattress burn.”
“Shall we get some more? There are plenty.”
“Let’s not take all our pleasure at once,” he suggested, with rare tact. “One mattress a day—how’ll that do?”
“We’ll have it at night,” cried Dorothy, clapping her hands, “and when the mattresses are all gone, we’ll do the beds and bureaus and the haircloth furniture in the parlour. Oh, I do so love a bonfire!”
Harlan’s heart grew strangely tender, for it had been this underlying childishness in her that he had loved the most. She was stirring the ashes now, with as much real pleasure as though she were five instead of twenty-five.
As it happened, Harlan would have been saved a great deal of trouble if he had followed out her suggestion and burned all of the beds in the house except two or three, but the balance between foresight and retrospection has seldom been exact.
“Beast of a smudge you’re making,” he commented, choking.
“Get around to the other side, then. Why, Harlan, what’s that?”
“What’s what?”
She pointed to a small metal box in the midst of the ashes.