Mrs. Poynsett readily consented. "Oh yes, my dear, let her do whatever she likes. Don't let me be a bugbear. A girl is never at home till she has had her will of the furniture. I think she will find that moving out the piano betrays the fading of the rest of the paper, but that is her affair. She is free to do just as she likes. I dare say the place does look antediluvian to young eyes." So Raymond was the bearer of his mother's full permission; and Cecil presided with great energy over the alterations, which she carried out by the aid of the younger servants, to the great disgust of their seniors. She expected the acclamations of her contemporaries; but it happened that the first of them to cross the room was Julius, on his way to his mother's room after luncheon, and he, having on a pair of make-shift glasses, till the right kind could be procured from London, was unprepared for obstacles in familiar regions, stumbled over an ottoman, and upset a table with the breakage of a vase. He apologized, with much regret; but the younger brothers made an outcry. "What has come to the place? Here's the table all over everything!" "And where are the bronzes?" "And the humming-birds? Miles's birds, that he brought home after his first voyage." "And the clock with the two jolly little Cupids? Don't you remember Miles and Will Bowater dressing them up for men-of-war's men? Mother could not bring herself to have them undressed for a year, and all the time the clock struck nohow!" "This is an anatomical study instead of a clock," lamented Frank. "I say, Cecil, do you like your friends to sit in their bones, like Sydney Smith?" "I never saw such a stupid old set of conservatives!" broke in Rosamond, feeling for Cecil's mortification. "In an unprejudiced eye the room looks infinitely better, quite revivified! You ought to be much obliged to Cecil for letting you see all her beautiful things." "Why don't you favour us with yours?" said Charlie. "I know better! Mine aren't fit to wipe the shoes of Cecil's! When I get into the Rectory you'll see how hideous they are!" said Rosamond, with the merriest complacency. "Couvre-pieds to set your teeth on edge, from the non-commissioned officers' wives; and the awfullest banner-screen you ever saw, worked by the drum-major's own hands, with Her Majesty's arms on one side, and the De Courcy ones on the other, and glass eyes like stuffed birds' to the lion and unicorn. We nearly expired from suppressed laughter under the presentation." Then she went round, extorting from the lads admiration for Cecil's really beautiful properties, and winning gratitude for her own cordial praise, though it was not the artistic appreciation they deserved. Indeed, Cecil yielded to the general vote for the restoration of the humming-birds, allowing that, though she did not like stuffed birds in a drawing-room, she would not have banished them if she had known their history.