roar, and a wind blowing from the river sent the cloud of black dust hurling toward them.
“Quick! Duck inside!” Bobs cautioned, as they all leaped within and closed the door with a bang.
“Jimminy-crickets!” she then ejaculated, using her favorite tom-boy expression. “The man who has this place to rent can’t advertise it as clean and quiet, a good place for nervous people to recuperate.” Then with a wry face toward her older sister. “I can’t imagine Gwen in this house, can you?”
There was a sudden troubled expression in Gloria’s eyes. “No, dear, I can’t. And I’m wondering, in fact I have often been wondering this morning, if we ought not to select some place where Gwen and little Lena May would be happier, for, of course, Gwen can’t keep on visiting her friends forever. She will have to come home some day.” The speaker felt a hand slip into hers and, glancing down, she saw a pleading in the uplifted eyes of their youngest. “I’d like to live here, Glow, for a while, if you would.”
“Little self-sacrificing puss that you are.” Gloria smiled at Miss Selenski, then said: “May we look over the old house and decide if we wish to take it? Time is passing and we have much packing to do if we are to return in another day or two.”
Although she did not say so, Bobs and Lena May knew that their mothering sister was eager to return to their Long Island home that she might see Gwendolyn before her departure.
The old colonial mansion, like many others of its kind, had a wide hall extending from the front to the back. At the extreme rear was a fireplace with built-in seats. In fact, to the great delight of Bobs, who quite adored them, a fireplace was found in each of the big barren rooms. Four of these were on that floor, with the old kitchen in the basement, and four vast silent rooms above, that had been bed chambers in the long ago. Too, there was an attic, which they did not visit.
When they had returned to the front hall, Bobs exclaimed: “We might rent just one floor of this mansion and then have room to spare.”
But the oldest sister looked dubious. “I hardly think it advisable to attempt to live in this place – ” she began. “There is enough room here to home an orphanage, and the kiddies wouldn’t be crowded, either.”
Roberta was plainly disappointed. “Oh, I say, Glow, haven’t you always told us younger girls not to make hasty conclusions, and here you have hardly more than crossed the threshold and you have decided that we couldn’t make the old house livable. Now, I think this room could be made real cozy.”
How the others laughed. “Bobs, what a word to apply to this old high-ceiled salon with its huge chandeliers and – ”
“Say, girls,” the irrepressible interrupted, “wouldn’t you like to see all of those crystals sparkle when the room is lighted?” Then she confessed, “Perhaps cozy isn’t exactly the right word, but nevertheless I like the place, and now, with the door closed, it isn’t so noisy either. It’s keen, take it from me.”
“Roberta,” Gloria sighed, “now and then I congratulate myself that you have actually reformed in your manner of speech, when – ”
“Say, Glow, I’ll make a bargain,” Bobs again interrupted. “I’ll talk like the daughter of Old-dry-as-dust-Johnson, if you’ll take this place. Now, my idea is that we can just furnish up this lower floor. Make one of the back rooms into a kitchen and dining-room, put in gas and electricity, and presto change, there you are living in a modern up-to-date apartment. Then we could lock up the basement and the rooms upstairs and forget they are there.”
“If you are permitted to forget,” Miss Selenski added, with her pleasant smile. Then, for the first time, the girls remembered that the old house was supposed to be supernaturally occupied.
It was Bobs who exclaimed: “Well, if that poor girl, Marilyn Pensinger, wants to come back here now and then and prowl about her very own ancestral mansion, I, for one, think we would be greatly lacking in hospitality if we didn’t make her welcome.”
Then pleadingly to her older sister: “Glow, be a sport! Take it for a month and give it a try-out.”
Lena May’s big brown eyes wonderingly watched this enthusiastic sister, who was but one year her senior, but whose tastes were widely different. Her gentle heart was already desperately homesick for the old place on Long Island, for the gardens that were a riot of flowers from spring until late fall.
Gloria walked to one of the windows and looked out meditatively. “If this is the only place in the neighborhood in which we can live,” she was thinking, “perhaps we would better take it, and, after all, Bobs may be right: this one floor can be made real homelike with the furniture that we will bring, and what we do not need can be stored in the rooms overhead.”
Bobs was eagerly awaiting her older sister’s decision, and when it was given, that hoidenish girl leaped about the room, staging a sort of wild Indian dance that must have amazed the two chandeliers which had in the long ago looked down upon dignified young ladies who solemnly danced the minuet, and yet, perhaps the lonely old house was glad and proud to think that it had been chosen as a residence for three girls, and that once again its walls would reverberate with laughter and song.
“We must start for home at once,” Gloria said. Then, to Miss Selenski, “We will stop on our way to the elevated and tell Mr. Tenowitz that we will take the place for a time; and thank you so much for having helped us find something. We shall want you to come often to see us.”
Bobs was the last one to leave, and before she closed the heavy old-fashioned door, she peered back into the musty dimness and called, “Good-bye, old house, we’re going to have jolly good times, all of us together.”
CHAPTER VI.
A LOST SISTER
Two weeks later many changes had taken place. Mr. Tenowitz had agreed to have one of the two large back rooms transformed into a modern kitchen at one end, and the other end arranged so that it might be used as a dining-room. In that room the early morning sun found its way, and when Lena May had filled the windows with boxes containing the flowering plants brought from the home gardens, it assumed a cheerfulness that delighted the heart of the little housekeeper.
Too, the huge chandeliers in the salon had been wired with electricity, and great was the joy in the heart of Bobs on the night when they were first lighted. The rich furnishings from their own drawing-room were in place and the effect was far more homelike than Gloria had supposed possible.
The two large rooms on the other side of the wide dividing hall had been fitted up as bed chambers and the furniture that they did not need had been stored in the large room over the kitchen.
How Lena May had dreaded that first night they had spent in the old house, not because she believed it to be haunted. Gloria had convinced her that that could not possibly be so, but because of the unusual noises, she knew that she would not be able to sleep a wink. Nor was she, for each time that she fell into a light slumber, a shriek from some passing tug awakened her, and a dozen times at least she seized her roommate, exclaiming, “Glow, what was that?” Sometimes it was a band of hoodlums passing, or again an early milk wagon, or some of the many noises which accompanied the night activities of the factory that was their next-door neighbor.
It was a very pale, sleepy-eyed Lena May who set about getting breakfast the next morning, with Gloria helping, but Bobs looked as refreshed as though she had spent the night in her own room on Long Island, where the whippoorwill was the only disturber of the peace.
“You’ll get used to it soon,” that
