“Five hundred dollars,” mused Miss Marcy, on the Boston train next morning. “Six rooms—living-room, dining-room, kitchen, and three bedrooms. That’s——”

“You forget,” warned Anthony Robeson from the seat where he faced Juliet and Mrs. Dingley. “That must cover the outside painting and repairs. You can’t figure on having more than three hundred dollars left for the inside.”

“Dear me, yes,” frowned Juliet. She held Anthony’s plan in her hand, and her tablets and pencil lay in her lap. “Well, I can spend fifty dollars on each room—only some will need more than others. The living-room will take the most—no, the dining-room.”

“The kitchen will take the most,” suggested Mrs. Dingley. “Your range will use up the most of your fifty. And kitchen utensils count up very rapidly.”

“It will be a very small range,” Anthony said. “A little toy stove would be more practical for our—the kitchen. How big is it, Juliet?”

“‘Ten by fourteen,’” read Juliet. “From the centre of the room you can hit all the side walls with the broom. Speaking of walls, Tony—those must be our first consideration. If we get our colour scheme right everything else will follow. I have it all in my head.”

So it proved. But it also proved, when they had been hard at work for an hour at a well-known decorator’s, that the tints and designs for which Miss Marcy asked were not readily to be found in the low-priced wall-papers to which Anthony rigidly held her.

“I must have the softest, most restful greens for the living-room,” she announced. “There—that——”

“But that is a dollar a roll,” whispered Anthony.

“Then—that!”

“Eighty-five cents.”

“But for that little room, Tony——”

“Twenty-five cents a roll is all we can allow,” insisted Anthony firmly. “And less than that everywhere else.”

The salesman was very obliging, and showed the best things possible for the money. It was impossible to resist the appeal in the eyes of this critical but restricted young buyer.

“There, that will do, I think,” said Juliet at length, with a long breath. “The green for the living-room and for the bit of a hall—No, no, Tony; I’ve just thought! You must take away that little partition and let the stairs go up out of the living-room. That will improve the apparent size of things wonderfully.”

“All right,” agreed Anthony obediently.

“Then we’ll put that rich red in the dining-room. For upstairs there is the tiny rose pattern, and the Delft blue, and that little pale yellow and white stripe. In the kitchen we’ll have the tile pattern. We won’t have a border anywhere—the rooms are too low; just those simplest mouldings, and the ivory white on the ceilings. The woodwork must all be white. There now, that’s settled. Next come the floors.”

There could be no doubt that Juliet was becoming interested in her task. Though the July heat was intense she led the way with rapid steps to the place where she meant to select her rugs. Here the three spent a trying two hours. It was hard to please Miss Marcy with Japanese jute rugs, satisfactory in colouring though many of them were, when she longed to buy Persian pieces of distinction. If Juliet had a special weakness it was for choice antique rugs.

She cornered Anthony at last, while Mrs. Dingley and the salesman were politely but unequivocally disputing over the quality of a certain piece of Chinese weaving.

“Tony,” she begged, “please let me get that one dear Turkish square for the living-room. It will give character to the whole room, and the colours are perfectly exquisite. I simply can’t get one of those cheap things to go in front of that beautiful old fireplace. Imagine the firelight on that square; it would make you want to spend your evenings at home. Please!”

“Do you imagine that I shall ever want to spend them anywhere else?” asked Tony softly, looking down into her appealing face. “Why, chum, I’d like to get that Tabriz you admire so much, if it would please you, in spite of the fact that we should have to pull the whole house up forty notches to match it. But even the Turkish square is out of the question.”

“But, Tony”—Juliet was whispering now with her head a little bent and her eyes on the lapel of his coat—“won’t you let me do it as my—my contribution? I’d like to put something of my own into your house.”

“You dear little girl,” Anthony answered—and possibly for her own peace of mind it was fortunate that Miss Langham, of California, could not see the look with which he regarded Miss Marcy, of Massachusetts—“I’m sure you would. And you are putting into it just what is priceless to me—your individuality and your perfect taste. But I can’t let even you help furnish that house. She—must take what I—and only I—can give her.”

“You’re perfectly ridiculous,” murmured Juliet, turning away with an expression of deep displeasure. “As if she wouldn’t bring all sorts of elegant stuff with her, and make your cheap things look insignificant.”

“I don’t think she will,” returned Anthony with conviction. “She’ll bring nothing out of keeping with the house.”

“I thought you told me she was of a wealthy family.”

“She is. But if she marries me she leaves all that behind. I’ll have no wife on any other basis.”

“Well—for a son of the Robesons of Kentucky you are absolutely the most absurd boy anybody ever heard of,” declared the girl hotly under her breath. Then she walked over and ordered a certain inexpensive rug for the living-room with the air of a princess and the cheeks of a poppy.