The room was rather low, and the walls and ceiling tinted a delicate green. There was a large centre square of white matting, fringed at the edge and a border of pale green around it. The three French windows had long soft curtains of white with pale green frills. No two chairs were alike. They were of rattan and pith, and bamboo in quaint shapes. One had a flat sea-green cushion of plush, one a triangular one of silk with frills of coral pink; there was a lovely pith sofa lounge, wide, inviting, with a pile of pillows in cool Liberty silk. In a corner the piano stood, a beautiful instrument though very plain. It was not draped in art muslin, and it had no photos or _bric-à-brac_ on it to jingle and spoil the wonderful music Dot brought forth from it. A great lamp stood beside it with a green crinkled paper canopy, restful to the eye. In another corner there was a low bookcase running along the wall; volumes of Browning caught the eye, Tennyson, William Morris, Shelley, Keats, all the gods. There was a sandal wood writing-table, with silver handles and silver equipments, a silver lamp with a rose-leaf shade, and a photo of baby in a silver chased frame. There was not a tambourine on the walls, not a single fan pocket, not a plaque. Half-a-dozen pictures perhaps, bits of exquisite colouring chiefly in long narrow gold frames; a sunset at Manly Lagoon, a bit of the Kanimbla valley, with summer upon it, a water colour of the road above Mossman's Bay, a woman's face, pale and unspeakably beautiful, painted against a background of purple velvet, some chrysanthemums, tawny yellow and brown. One or two engravings as well. 'Wedded' in an oak frame hung over the piano. Dot said the man was Larrie's very counterpart; when she sang she used to look up at it and feel glad he was her husband. On a tall easel on a table there was the 'Peacemaker.' Larrie said the little girl was Dot. There were bits of quaint china on the little tables, and a few photographs, not many. Flowers there were in all possible places. Daffodils and spiky leaves in the windows, roses and 'shivery' grass on the tables, low vases of violets and primroses, tall ones of jonquils. Dot dusted this room herself every morning, then before she could put the duster away, the piano would tempt her, and the rest of the house be forgotten. But for Peggie what a place it would have been! Peggie was a real Cornstalk. She was fully five-feet-eleven, and had impossibly long arms and an impossible number of freckles. But she had also all a Cornstalk's warm, honest heart; she was devoted to Dot and Larrie, and absolutely worshipped the baby. She made no better a servant as far as work went, than the average untrained Australian girl; but she was wonderfully learned in the ways and wants of babyhood, and so was invaluable to Dot who was absurdly ignorant. When Larrie had engaged her twelve months ago at a Sydney registry office, he had asked her name. 'Marjorie Dorothy Pegerton,' she said.