Corey turned to the latter.  "I suppose you've all helped to plan it?" 

 "Oh no; the architect and mamma did that." 

 "But they allowed the rest of us to agree, when we were good," said Penelope. 

 Corey looked at her, and saw that she was shorter than her sister, and had a dark complexion. 

 "It's very exciting," said Irene. 

 "Come up," said the Colonel, rising, "and look round if you'd like to." 

 "I should like to, very much," said the young man. He helped the young ladies over crevasses of carpentry and along narrow paths of planking, on which they had made their way unassisted before. The elder sister left the younger to profit solely by these offices as much as possible. She walked between them and her father, who went before, lecturing on each apartment, and taking the credit of the whole affair more and more as he talked on. 

 "There!" he said, "we're going to throw out a bay-window here, so as get the water all the way up and down. This is my girls' room," he added, looking proudly at them both. 

 It seemed terribly intimate. Irene blushed deeply and turned her head away. 

 But the young man took it all, apparently, as simply as their father. "What a lovely lookout!" he said. The Back Bay spread its glassy sheet before them, empty but for a few small boats and a large schooner, with her sails close-furled and dripping like snow from her spars, which a tug was rapidly towing toward Cambridge. The carpentry of that city, embanked and embowered in foliage, shared the picturesqueness of Charlestown in the distance. 

 "Yes," said Lapham, "I go in for using the best rooms in your house yourself. If people come to stay with you, they can put up with the second best. Though we don't intend to have any second best. There ain't going to be an unpleasant room in the whole house, from top to bottom." 

 "Oh, I wish papa wouldn't brag so!" breathed Irene to her sister, where they stood, a little apart, looking away together. 

 The Colonel went on.  "No, sir," he swelled out, "I have gone in for making a regular job of it. I've got the best architect in 

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