There were handsome marble mantels and inlaid hearths and carved woodwork and signs of former grandeur everywhere, and Connie, who appreciated it all, held her breath as she went through the lower rooms and then ascended the stairs and followed Kenneth through one room after another, with here and there pieces of furniture standing in them. Young as she was, Connie’s perceptions were mature and quick, and she recognized the difference between this house and the one across the way. “Grand folks used to live here. Where are they? Tell me about them,” she said, as they stood in what had been Mrs. Morris’ bed-chamber, where Harry was born and his mother had died, and where a mahogany bedstead and bureau, with a stationary wash-stand and silver faucet were still standing. “All dead but Hal,” Kenneth answered, as they sat down in a deep seat of one of the windows. “Yes, Hal. That’s Harry, who had everything on the tree and you nothing,” Connie replied. “Why don’t he live here, where there are bowls and things for the water to come in and go out, as we have in the city, and a hole in the floor for the heat to come through?” She had spied a rusty register and was trying to open it, and her tone implied that this house was more to her taste than the farmhouse, and Kenneth felt a little hurt, but soon recovered himself and told her of the times, as he had heard of them from his mother, when his Uncle Morris lived there with his wife, a frail, lovely young girl who, knowing nothing of the world as her husband knew it, could not keep pace with his ideas and shrank from the gay company with which he filled the house. “He had the best horses in the country for the men to ride,” Kenneth said, “and packs of dogs to hunt with in the fall, and my aunt had a maid and a nurse, who wore a cap, with great long strings, for Hal, until she died.” “Oh-h!” Connie said, “that was splendid,” her natural love for luxury coming to the surface. “And your aunt died in that bed, and Harry was born in it?” she continued, walking round on three sides of the bedstead and stroking it with her hands, while there awoke in her heart a kind of pity for Harry, who, by the death of his mother, and something in his father, she couldn’t quite make out what, had been obliged to leave this handsome home for the farmhouse, where there was no mahogany furniture, no nurses with caps and streamers and no maids. “I’d like to see Harry,” she said. “I wonder if I ever shall, and if I should like him as well as I do you. Give him my love, and say I’m sorry for him.” “Sorry! Why?” Kenneth asked, and something in his tone made Connie look up quickly before she replied. “Sorry that his folks are dead,—his pretty mother and his father, who must have been a gentleman like those in New York,—and because he had to leave this handsome house.” Kenneth was really hurt now. Here was flunkeyism he had not expected.