Mrs. Red Pepper | Page 9

could have done the work for you instead of you for me. It isn't the work, either, it's the--love."
"And you couldn't have spared enough of that to furnish a room with?"
He laughed, drawing her even closer then he had held her before. "I'll trust you to corner me, every time," he said. "Yes, I could have spared love enough--no doubt of that. But it seems as if it were the man who should put the house in order for the woman he brings home."
"You have excellent taste," said she demurely, "but I never should credit you with the discriminations and fastidiousnesses of a decorator. And why should you want to take away from me the happiness of making my own nest? Don't you know it's the home-maker who finds most joy in the home? Yet--it's the home-comer I want to have find the joy. Do you think you can rest in this room, Red?"
He drew a deep, contented breath. "Every minute I am in it. And from the time I first begin to think about it, coming toward it. Home! It's Paradise! This great, deep, all-embracing blue thing we're sitting in--is it made of down and velvet?"
"Precisely that. Velvet to cover it, down in the pillows. I hope you'll have many a splendid nap here."
"You'll spoil me," he declared, "if you let me sleep here. I'm used to catching forty winks in my old leather chair in the office, while I wait for a summons."
Her face grew very tender. "I know. James Macauley has told me more than one tale of hours spent there, when you needed sounder sleep. It's a hard life, and it's going to be my delight to try to make it easier."
Red Pepper sat up. "It's not a hard life, dear,--it's one of many compensations. And now that I have one permanent compensation I'm never going to think I'm being badly used, no matter what goes wrong. Come, let's stroll about. I want to look at every separate thing. This piano--surely the sum I gave you didn't cover that? It looks like one of the sort that are not bought two-for-a-quarter."
"No, Red, that was mine. It came from my old home with Aunt Lucy--that and the desk-bookcase, and two of the chairs. And Aunt Lucy gave me this big rug, made from the old drawing-room carpet. I built the whole room on the rug colourings. You don't mind, do you, dear?--my using these few things that belonged to me in my girlhood, in South Carolina?"
"In your girlhood? Not--in your Washington life?"
"No, Red."
She looked straight up into his eyes, reading in the sudden glowing of them under their heavy brows the feeling he could not conceal that he could bear to have about his house no remote suggestion of her former marriage.
"All right, dearest," he answered quickly. "I'm a brute, I know, but--you're mine now. Will you play for me? I believe I'm fond of music."
"Of course you are. But first, let's go upstairs. I'm almost as proud of our guest-rooms as of this."
"Guest-rooms?" repeated Burns, a few minutes later, when he had examined everything in the living-room and pronounced all things excellent. "We're to have guests, are we? But not right away?"
"I thought you'd be eager to entertain those bachelor friends you mentioned, so I lost no time in getting a second room ready for them."
"Well, I don't know." Burns was mounting the stairs, his arm about his wife's shoulders. "By the way, Ellen, I don't believe I ever went up these stairs before. Comfortable, aren't they? I'm glad there's covering on them. I never like to hear people racketing up and down bare stairs, be they never so polished and fine. That comes of my instincts for quiet on my patients' account, I suppose. About the guests--we don't need to have any for a year or two, do we?"
"Why, Red!" Ellen began to laugh. "I thought you were the most hospitable man in the world."
"All in good time," agreed her husband, comfortably. He looked in at the door of the gray-and-rose room, as he spoke. "Well, well!" he ejaculated. "Well, well!"
And again he was silent, staring. When he spoke:
"Would you mind going over there and sitting down in that willow chair with the high back?" he requested.
His wife acceded, and crossing the room smiled back at him from the depths of the white willow chair, her dark head against its cushioning of soft, mingled tints of pale gray and glowing rose. Red Pepper nodded at her.
"I thought so," said he. "This is no guest-room. This is your room."
"Oh, no, dear. My place is downstairs, with you--unless--you don't want me there."
He crossed the room also and stood before her, his hands thrust into his pockets. "This is your room," he repeated. "It's easy enough to recognize