Page:Left to Themselves (1891).djvu/173

 old-fashioned furniture, not used very much," he soliloquized, passing from one chamber to another of the second story. Every thing was clean, cheerful, and in stiff and even polished order except Mr. and Mrs. Obed Probasco's own big room, evidently in too much use for apple-pie order to be preserved. One or two doors up-stairs were locked. It was plain that to the Probascos a house was one thing, living in it was another. A huge attic, that startled Philip by the bewildering array of odds and ends crowded in it, took up the space immediately under the roof.

He descended quickly to the lower hall again, on his way back to Gerald. His head was giddy; he began to feel a great faintness, but the main question of their finding shelter and food was settled.

"I will fetch Gerald, ransack for what eatables there must be, get him to bed, and then we'll await developments and the showing up of these Probascos—how many or what sort they be. We seem to be more than ever castaways, but castaways under such a state of things as never I have read about."

The dog, with a hunger very evident to him,