CHAPTER XV. MISS HANSFORD AND ELITHE. Miss Hansford had had many misgivings with regard to the wisdom of having sent for her niece. She had lived alone so long and her habits were so fixed that she dreaded the thought of a young person singing and whistling and banging doors and slatting her things round. She had tried to guard against some of these habits in her letter to Roger, but there was no knowing what a girl would do, and Lucy Potter’s girl, too. Still she had committed herself and must make the best of it. “I shall use her well, of course,” she said many times, and as often as she dusted her mantel in the front room where Elithe’s picture was standing she stopped and looked at the face and talked to it until she almost felt that it was the real Elithe whose dark eyes met hers so seriously. “She’s pretty to look at and no mistake, but handsome is that handsome does, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” she said more than once, while she busied herself with the room Elithe was to occupy. It was a low back room with the windows looking out upon an open space and clumps of oak and woods beyond, with no view of the sea. A room she seldom rented and which she at first hesitated about assigning to Elithe. “I shall want all the t’others for the gentry when the wedding comes off,” she decided, and then went to work to make the back room as attractive as possible. A light pretty matting was laid upon the floor. The old-fashioned bedstead, put together with ropes, and on which she had slept when a girl in Ridgefield, was sold to a Portuguese woman, and its place supplied by a single white bedstead with a canopy over the head. She had seen a bed like this at the Ralston House in a child’s room, and was imitating it as far as possible. That was brass, with hangings of point d’esprit, while hers was iron, with hangings of dotted muslin, but the effect was much the same. The chest of drawers which had belonged to her mother was moved into her own room and a small white pine bureau, with blue forget-me-nots painted on it, put in its place. The square stand was covered with a fine white damask towel, with a Bible and Hymn Book laid upon it. The rocker was white, the curtains at the windows were white, the toilet articles were white, everything was white. “A White Room,” Paul Ralston christened it, for he saw it on the day the last touches were put to it and just before he started to join Clarice in New York. Miss Hansford was adjusting the pillow-shams when she heard Paul below calling to her. “Up here in Elithe’s room. Come and see it,” she said, and Paul ran up the narrow stairs two at a time and stood at the door, uncertain whether he ought to cross the threshold or not. A young girl’s sleeping apartment was a sacred place, and he hesitated a moment until Miss Hansford bade him come in and see if it wasn’t pretty.