Mrs. Red Pepper | Page 9

make sure that
there was no displeasure in his face. Instead she found there deeper
feeling than she expected. He returned her look, and she discovered that
he was not finding it easy to tell her what he thought of it all. She led
him to the couch and drew him down beside her. He put his arm about
her, and with her head upon his shoulder the pair sat for some time in a
silence which Ellen would not end. But at length, looking into the fire,
his head resting against hers, Burns broke the stillness.
"I suppose I'm an impressionable chap," he said, "but I wasn't prepared
for just this. I knew it would be a beautiful room, if you saw to it, but I
had no possible notion how beautiful it would be. There is just one
thing about it that breaks me up a bit. Perhaps you won't understand,
but I can't help wishing I 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'