"Don't I? You wait and see," said the Colonel, stirring his tea.

"I don't believe you do," pursued the girl.

"Is that so? I presume you'd hate to have me.
Your mother does." He said DOOS, of course.

Penelope took the word. "I go in for it. I don't see
any use in not enjoying money, if you've got it to enjoy.
That's what it's for, I suppose; though you mightn't
always think so." She had a slow, quaint way of talking,
that seemed a pleasant personal modification of some
ancestral Yankee drawl, and her voice was low and cozy,
and so far from being nasal that it was a little hoarse.

"I guess the ayes has it, Pen," said her father.
"How would it do to let Irene and your mother stick
in the old place here, and us go into the new house?"
At times the Colonel's grammar failed him.

The matter dropped, and the Laphams lived on as before,
with joking recurrences to the house on the water side
of Beacon. The Colonel seemed less in earnest than any
of them about it; but that was his way, his girls said;
you never could tell when he really meant a thing.



III.