When she had hurried up the steps and shut the door behind her, Helen felt privileged again to be just as merry as she chose, for she was even more at home here than in the woods; it seemed as if everything were stretching out its arms to her to welcome her, and to invite her to carry out her declared purpose of taking the reins of government in her own hands.
Upon one side of the hallway was a parlor, and on the other side two rooms, which Mr. Davis had used as a reception room and a study. The parlor had never been opened, and Helen promised herself a jolly time superintending the fixing up of that; on the other side she had already taken possession of the front room, symbolically at any rate, by having her piano moved in and her music unpacked, and a case emptied for the books she had brought from Germany. To be sure, on the other side was still a dreary wall of theological treatises in funereal black, but Helen was not without hopes that continued doses of cheerfulness might cure her father of such incomprehensible habits, and obtain for her the permission to move the books to the attic.
To start things in that direction the girl now danced gaily into the study where her father was in the act of writing “thirdly, brethren,” for his next day's sermon; and crying out merrily,
“Up, up my friend, and quit your books,
Or surely you'll grow double!”
she saluted her reverend father with the sweetest of kisses, and then seated herself on the arm of his chair and gravely took his pen out of his hand, and closed his inkstand. She turned over the “thirdly, brethren,” without blotting it, and recited solemnly:
“One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good.
Than all the sages can!”
And then she laughed the merriest of merry laughs and added, “Daddy, dear, I am an impulse! And I want you to spare some time for me.”
“Yes, my love,” said Mr. Davis, smiling upon her, though groaning inwardly for his lost ideas. “You are beautiful this morning, Helen. What have you been doing?”
“I've had a glorious walk,” replied the girl, “and all kinds of wonderful adventures; I've had a dance with the morning wind, and a race of a mile or two with a brook, and I've sung duets with all the flowers,—and here you are writing uninteresting things!”
“It's my sermon, Helen,” said Mr. Davis.