“You write your grandma and your Aunt Lois to keep their hands off; your father is looking after you now,” he instructed the children, and with a promise to install them in the proper school the next day he put his hat on the side of his head and was off to the Lesterville Hotel, where Mr. Hartwell was stopping, because he didn’t have much chance to see his old friend anymore.

The children examined the rooms curiously, wanting to be pleased but a little bewildered. The room which was to be their bedroom, living room, and kitchen still bore traces of its original purpose, which was an old-fashioned family kitchen, but parlor and bedroom perquisites had been added for lodgers’ needs. There was a bird’s-eye maple folding bed with a bulging front for the children, a worn Morris chair, a richly carved, black walnut armchair (some of this carving proved later to be examples of petrified spearmint), a clothes rack in a niche formerly used for the stove. The floor was camouflaged with a mottled, scuffed, brownish linoleum, which stopped at the middle door to join a scuffed, greenish linoleum. A card table with dangerously inclined legs was disguised by a tasseled plum-velvet drape, the stain in the middle almost hidden by the pewter dish of colored clay fruit from Mexico. This room opened by lofty arched sliding doors into the dark alcove, formerly dining room, in which Papa’s brass bed and an enormous black walnut wardrobe were wedged. Another sliding door leading to Mrs. Jane’s own rooms was boarded up with odd pieces of water-soaked beaverboard. In here a small, high window was hung with ruffled dimity curtains, dusty and flyblown, but as coy as if they gave on some sunny daisy field instead of an airshaft. A black stovepipe came mysteriously in one aperture near the ceiling, crooked an elbow and went out another for no purpose but decoration, since whatever stove was ever connected with it had long since been junked, but Mrs. Jane said the pipes looked better than holes in the plaster.