drawing-room. They had a cosy breakfast room beside the big dining-room
and there were a music room and a billiard room and a den and great hall
with a spreading staircase; and the second story was a maze of bedrooms,
guest rooms and bathrooms.

It took Patty some days even to learn her way round, and she loved every
room, hall and passage. There were fascinating windows, great wide and
deep ones, and little oriels and dormers. There were unexpected turns and
nooks, and there was,--which brought joy to Patty's heart,--plenty of
closet space.

The whole place was of noble proportions and magnificent size, but
Patty's home-making talents brought cosiness to the rooms they themselves
used and stateliness and beauty to the more formal apartments.

"We must look ahead," she told Billee, "for I expect to spend my whole
life here. I don't want to fix a place up just as I like it, and then
scoot off and leave it and live somewhere else. And when our daughter
begins to have beaux and entertain house parties, we'll need all the
room there is."

"You have what Mr. Lucas calls a 'leaping mind,'" Bill remarked. "But I'm
ready to confess I like room enough to swing a cat in,--even if I've no
intention of swinging poor puss."

And so they set blithely to work to furnish their ancestral halls, as
Patty called them, claiming that an ancestral hall had to have a
beginning some time, and she was beginning hers now.

Such fun as it was selecting rugs and hangings, furniture and ornaments,