When he had gone, Cornelia stood in the middle of her dreary little parlor, and looked around with startled eyes. Here she had contracted to have windows put in and the partition taken down, and promised to go into business herself right away at once. What would her father say to it all? But she could see Harry and Louise coming down the street, and she hurried into the kitchen to prepare the dessert for dinner; for it was getting late for what she had planned. She must put the new ideas out of her mind and get back to her work, or dinner would be late. The children came bursting into the kitchen, eager to see how much Carey had accomplished, and clattered down cellar and up again, their hands full of cookies their sister had baked, their eyes happy, and somehow home and life looked good to Cornelia. This was the great day at college when the play on which she had spent so much time and thought was to come off, and she had expected to have a hard time bearing the thought that all that was going on and she not in it; but she never once thought of it all day until just as her head was touching the pillow that night, and then she was so sleepy that it only came as a floating thought of some far-off period of her existence in which she now had no part. She was wholly and entirely interested just now in her home and what she was going to do for the neighborhood. She had not told her father yet about the carpenter and his propositions. She wanted to have something more definite to tell, perhaps to surprise her family with, if possible; so she had merely asked him casually if he objected to her making little inexpensive changes in the house, things that she could manage herself; and he had joyously told her to do what she liked, pull the walls down if she wanted to, only so she got things fixed to please her. CHAPTER X