At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern
after all, was the main thing.

In each of the two front rooms, upstairs, was a single round window, too high for one to look out of without standing on a chair, though in both rooms there was plenty of side light. One wing on each side of the house had been carried up to the second story, and the arrangement of rooms was the same as below, outside stairways leading from the kitchens to the ground. 9

9

“I never saw so many beds in my life,” cried Dorothy.

“Seems to be a perfect Bedlam,” rejoined Harlan, making a poor attempt at a joke and laughing mirthlessly. In his heart he began to doubt the wisdom of marrying on six hundred dollars, an unexplored heirloom in Judson Centre, and an overweening desire to write books.

For the first time, his temerity appeared to him in its proper colours. He had been a space writer and Dorothy the private secretary of a Personage, when they met, in the dreary basement dining-room of a New York boarding-house, and speedily fell in love. Shortly afterward, when Harlan received a letter which contained a key, and announced that Mr. Judson’s house, fully furnished, had been bequeathed to his nephew, they had light-heartedly embarked upon matrimony with no fears for the future.

Two hundred dollars had been spent upon a very modest honeymoon, and the three hundred and ninety-seven dollars and twenty-three cents remaining, as Harlan had accurately calculated, seemed pitifully small. Perplexity, doubt, and foreboding were plainly 10 written on his face, when Dorothy turned to him.

10

“Isn’t it perfectly lovely,” she asked, “for us to have this nice, quiet place all to ourselves, where you can write your book?”

Woman-like, she had instantly touched the right chord, and the clouds vanished.

“Yes,” he cried, eagerly. “Oh, Dorothy, do you think I can really write it?”

“Write it,” she repeated; “why, you dear, funny goose, you can write a better book than anybody has ever written yet, and I know you can! By next week we’ll be settled here and you can get down to work. I’ll help you, too,” she added, generously. “If you’ll buy me a typewriter, I can copy the whole book for you.”

“Of course I’ll buy you a typewriter. We’ll send for it to-morrow. How much does a 
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