Like many capable people, who fuss aimlessly when there is really little to do, but bring their best efforts to bear swiftly under stress, Miss Keith set in motion certain necessary preparations for an afternoon meal, which should be a compromise between a country dinner and supper, and then went to the south parlour, until a few days ago her pride and the most precise best room in the neighbourhood, and sitting quietly down with hands folded in her lap, took a final survey. Something had suddenly changed her attitude toward the room. She ceased thinking of it as her state apartment, sacred to sewing society meetings and the more formal and rare social function of a high tea to welcome the wife of a new minister, and now looked at it as it was to be, the bedroom to which her Cousin Adam was coming for rest, and as she sat there it occurred to her that it was the very room in which he had been born. Then there stole over her one of those subtle inspirations called intuition, with which the Creator has blessed woman as a token of sympathy with their weaknesses and a reward for much unspoken suffering, and thereby more than bridged the difference of her physical inequality with man. If the hope was to bring Adam Lawton back to himself, what could be more suitable than that the surroundings should be those of his early youth? Ringing the dinner bell out of the back door, the sign to Larsen that he was wanted, Miss Keith began by taking the decorated “fireboard” from before the wide fireplace, and brushing up the fragments of swallow’s nests that had fallen down since the regular autumn clearing. Going to a deep closet under the back stairs, she pulled out a large bundle wrapped in papers and cloth, which being unrolled gave forth a pair of long-necked andirons, with oval head-pieces and curiously curved legs, made of what was known in the old days as princess metal, a warm-hued alloy of copper and brass. Setting these in the fireplace, she directed Larsen, who now appeared in the carpet slippers without which he never dared come indoors, to bring in logs and lay a substantial fire with backlog, forestick, catstick, and kindling, such as would outlast a night, instead of the mere “splutter blaze that needs tending like a spoiled child,” as she called the modern wood fire.