“Not a bit of it!” Sin exclaimed triumphantly, turning round and facing him, all rosy with the loving romp she had been having just a little while before with her babies.  “Frank!  I’ve got a pair of Abraham’s angels down-stairs!  Or Mrs. Abraham’s,—­if she ever had any.  I don’t remember that they used to send them to women much, now I think of it, after Eve demeaned herself to entertain the old serpent.  Ah! the babies came instead; that was it!  Well; there is a couple in the kitchen now, at any rate; and they’re toasting and stewing in the most E—­lysian manner!  That’s what you smell.”

“Angels?  Babies?  What terrible ambiguity!  What, or who, is stewing, if you please, dear?”

“Muffins.  No! oysters.  There! you sha’n’t know anything about it till you go down to tea.  But the millennium’s come, and it’s begun in our house.”

“I knew that, six years ago,” said Frank Scherman.  “There are exactly nine hundred and ninety-four left of it.  I can wait till tea-time with the patience of the saints.”

CHAPTER XXVIII.

“LIVING IN.”

Desire Ledwith went over to Leicester Place with Bel Bree, when she returned there for the first needful sorting and packing and removing.  Bel could not go alone, to risk any meeting; to put herself, voluntarily and unprotected in the way again.  Miss Ledwith took a carriage and called for her.  In that manner they could bring away nearly all.  What remained could be sent for.

Miss Smalley possessed some movables of her own, though the furnishings in her room had been mostly Mrs. Pimminy’s.  There were some things of her aunt’s that Bel would like, and which she had asked leave to bring to Mrs. Scherman’s.

The light, round table, with its old fashioned slender legs and claw feet, its red cloth, and the books and little ornaments, Bel wanted in her sleeping-room.  “Because they were Aunt Blin’s,” she said, “and nothing else would seem so pleasant.  She should like to take them with her wherever she went.”

The two trunks—­hers and Katy’s—­(Bel had Aunt Blin’s great flat-topped one now, with its cushion and flounce of Turkey red; and Kate had speedily stitched up a cover for hers to match, of cloth that Mrs. Scherman gave her) stood one each side the chimney,—­in the recesses.  A red and white patchwork quilt, done in stars, Bel’s own work before she ever came to Boston, lay folded across the foot of the bed, in patriotic contrast with the blue,—­reversing the colors in stars and stripes.  Bel had found in the attic a discarded stairway drugget, scarlet and black, of which, the centre was worn to threads, but the bright border still remained; and this she had asked for and sewed around the square of neutral tinted carpet, upon whose middle the round table stood, covering its dullness with red again, the color of the cloth.  There was plenty of bordering left, of which she pieced a foot-mat for the floor before the dressing-glass, and in the open grate now lay a little unlighted pile of kindlings and coals, as carefully placed behind well blackened bars and a facing of paper, as that in the parlor below.