In accordance with her resolution to make the best of things, she set about making the shack more comfortable and homelike. There were many of those things which, small in themselves, count for much, that her busy brain planned to do during the time taken up in the necessary overhauling. This cleaning-up process had taken several days, interrupted as it was by the ordinary daily routine. To her unaccustomed hand, the task of preparing three hearty meals a day was a matter that consumed a large amount of time, but gradually, day by day, she found herself systematizing her task and becoming less inexpert. To be sure she made many mistakes; once, indeed, in a fit of preoccupation, while occupied in rearranging the bedroom, burning up the entire dinner. Upon his return, her husband had found her red-eyed and apologetic. "Oh, well!" he said. "It ain't worth crying over. What is the saying? 'Hell wasn't built in a day'?" Nora screamed with laughter. "I think you're mixing two old saws. Rome wasn't built in a day and Hell is paved with good intentions." "Well," he laughed good-naturedly, "they both seem to hit the case." He certainly was unfailingly good-tempered. Not that there were not times when Nora did not have to remind herself of her new resolution and he, for his part, exercise all his forbearance. But in the main, things went more smoothly than either had dared to hope from their inauspicious beginning. The thing that Nora found hardest to bear was that he never lost a certain masterful manner. It was a continual reminder that she had been defeated. Then, too, he had a maddening way of rewarding her for good conduct which was equally hard to bear, until she realized that it was perfectly unconscious on his part. For example: after she had struggled for a week with her makeshift kitchen outfit, small in the beginning but greatly reduced by her destructive outburst on the night of their arrival, he had, without saying a word to her of his intentions, driven over to Prentice and laid in an entire new stock of crockery and several badly needed pots and pans. Nora had found it hard to thank him. If they had been labeled "For a Good Child" she could not have felt more humiliated. And what was equally trying, he seemed to have divined her thoughts, for his smile, upon receiving her halting thanks, had not been without a touch of malicious amusement. On the other hand, all her little efforts to beautify the little house and make it more livable met with his enthusiastic approval and support. He was as delighted as a child with everything she did, and often, when baffled for the moment by some lack of material for carrying out some proposed scheme, he came to the rescue with an ingenious suggestion which solved the vexed problem at once.