Free, we were drawn irresistibly back to the out-of-doors furniture. We jumped in the middle of the mattresses lying in the grass, we hung the comforters and quilts in long overlapping rows on the clothes line and ran from one end to the other within that tent-like enclosure. Margaret Amelia arranged herself languidly on the Brussels couch that ordinarily stood in the upstairs hall piled with leather-bound reports, but now, scales falling from our eyes, we saw to be the bank of a stream whereon Maid Marian reclined; but while Betty and I were trying to decide which should be Robin Hood and which Alan-a-dale (alas, for our chivalry ... we were both holding out to be Robin) Maid Marian settled it by dancing down the stair carpet which made a hallway half across the lawn. We followed her. The terminus brought us back to the parlour window. We stepped on the coping and stared inside. This was our parlour! Yet it looked no more like the formal room which we seldom entered than a fairy looks like a mortal. Many and many a time an empty room is so much more a suggestive, haunted, beckoning place than ever it becomes after its furniture gets it into bondage. Rooms are often free, beautiful creatures before they are saddled and bridled with alien lives and with upholstery, and hitched for lumbering, permanent uses. I felt this vaguely even then. “It’s like the cloth in the store,” I observed, balancing on my stomach on the sill. “It’s heaps prettier before it’s made up into clothes.” “How funny,” said Margaret Amelia. “I like the trimming on, and the pretty buttons.” “Let’s play,” I said hurriedly; for I had seen in her eyes that look which always comes into eyes whose owners have just called an idea “funny.” “Very well. But,” said Betty, frankly, “I’m awful sick of playing Pretend. You always want to play that. We played that last time anyhow. Let’s play Store. Let’s play,” she said, with sudden zest, “Furniture Store, outdoors.” The whole lawn became the ground floor for our shop. Forthwith we arranged the aisles of chairs, stopping to sit in this one and that “to taste the difference.” To sit in the patent upholstered rocker, close to the flowering currant bush fragrant with spicy, yellow buds was like being somewhere else. “This looks like the pictures of greenhouses,” said Margaret Amelia, dragging a willow chair to the Bridal Wreath at the fork in the brick walk. She idled there for a moment. “Emily Broom says that when they moved she rode right through town on their velvet lounge on the dray,” she volunteered. We pictured it mutely. Something like that had been a dream of mine. Now and then, I had walked backward on the street to watch a furniture wagon delivering a new chair that rocked idle and unoccupied in the box. I always marvelled at the unimaginativeness of the driver which kept him on the wagon seat. “We’ve never moved,” I confessed regretfully.