CHAPTER VI.

THE TOWER ROOM.

As time went on, Grace surely did not have to share a third part of her sisters’ room, did she?  For nothing is so much prized by most girls as a room of their very own, and a middle daughter, particularly such a middle daughter as Grace Wainwright, has a claim to a foothold—­a wee bit place, as the Scotch say—­where she can shut herself in, and read her Bible, and say her prayers, and write her letters, and dream her dreams, with nobody by to see.  Mrs. Wainwright had been a good deal disturbed about there being no room for Grace when she came back to Highland, and one would have been fitted up had there been an extra cent in the family exchequer.  Grace didn’t mind, or if she did, she made light of her sacrifice; but her sisters felt that they ought to help her to privacy.

Eva and Miriam came over to the Manse to consult us in the early days.

I suggested screens.

“You can do almost anything with screens and portieres,” I said.  “One of the loveliest rooms I ever saw in my life is in a cottage in the Catskills, where one large room is separated into drawing-room, library, and dining-room, and sometimes into a spare chamber, as well, by the judicious use of screens.”

“Could we buy them at any price we could pay?” said Miriam.

“Buy them, child?  What are you talking about?  You can make them.  You need only two or three clothes-horses for frames, some chintz, or even wall-paper or calico, a few small tacks, a little braid, a hammer and patience.”

After Grace was fairly launched on her career as teacher, mother suggested one day that the tower-room at Wishing-Brae could be transformed into a maiden’s bower without the spending of much money, and that it would make an ideal girl’s room, “just the nest for Grace, to fold her wings in and sing her songs—­a nest with an outlook over the tree-tops and a field of stars above it.”

“Mother dear, you are too poetical and romantic for anything, but I believe,” said Amy, “that it could be done, and if it could it ought.”

The tower at Wishing-Brae was then a large, light garret-room, used for trunks and boxes.  Many a day have I spent there writing stories when I was a child, and oh! what a prospect there was and is from those windows—­prospect of moors and mountains, of ribbons of rivers and white roads leading out to the great world.  You could see all Highland from the tower windows.  In sunny days and in storms it was a delight beyond common just to climb the steep stairs and hide one’s self there.

We put our heads together, all of us.  We resolved at last that the tower-room should be our birthday gift to Grace.  It was quite easy to contrive and work when she was absent, but not so easy to keep from talking about the thing in her presence.  Once or twice we almost let it out, but she suspected nothing, and we glided over the danger as over ice, and hugged ourselves that we had escaped.  We meant it for a surprise.