The girl entered the great hallway, with its huge fireplace and its winding stairway, and then strolled through the parlors of the vast house; Helen had in all its fullness the woman's passion for spending money for beautiful things, and it had been her chief woe in all her travels that the furniture and pictures and tapestry which she gazed at with such keen delight must be forever beyond her thoughts. Just at present her fancy was turned loose and madly reveling in these memories, while always above her wildest flights was the intoxicating certainty that there was no reason why they should not all be possible. She could not but recollect with a wondering smile that only yesterday she had been happy at the thought of arranging one dingy little parlor in her country parsonage, and had been trying to persuade her father to the extravagance of re-covering two chairs. It would have been hard for Helen to keep her emotions from Mr. Harrison, and he must have guessed the reason why she was so flushed and excited. They were standing just then in the center of the great dining-room, with its massive furniture of black mahogany, and she was saying that it ought to be papered in dark red, and was conjuring up the effect to herself. “Something rich, you know, to set off the furniture,” she explained. “And you must take that dreadful portrait from over the mantel,” she added, laughing. (It was a picture of a Revolutionary warrior, on horseback and in full uniform, the coloring looking like faded oilcloth.) “I had thought of that myself,” said Mr. Harrison. “It's the founder of the Eversons; there's a picture gallery in a hall back of here, with two whole rows of ancestors in it.” “Why don't you adopt them?” asked Helen mischievously. “One can buy all the ancestors one wants to, nowadays,” laughed Mr. Harrison. “I thought I'd make something more interesting out of it. I'm not much of a judge of art, you know, but I thought if I ever went abroad I'd buy up some of the great paintings that one reads about--some of the old masters, you know.” “I'm afraid you'd find very few of them for sale,” said Helen, smiling. “I'm not accustomed to fail in buying things that I want,” was the other's reply. “Are you fond of pictures?” “Very much indeed,” answered the girl. As a matter of fact, the mere mention of the subject opened a new kingdom to her, for she could not count the number of times she had sat before beautiful pictures and almost wept at the thought that she could never own one that was really worth looking at. “I brought home a few myself,” she said to her companion,--“just engravings, you know, half a dozen that I thought would please me; I mean to hang them around my music-room.” “Tell me about it,” said Mr. Harrison. “I have been thinking of fixing up such a place myself, you know. I thought of extending the house on the side that has the fine view of the valley, and making part a piazza, and part a conservatory or music-room.”