Part 67 (1/2)

”Good evening--” solemnly.

”Good evening--” seriously.

I was choosing amongst a half-dozen choice sentences I had framed as an introduction to my parting speech, when she said quietly, looking up: ”I thought you might not come back this evening.”

”I have come to say good-by.”

”Are you going away?” Her voice expressed surprise--nothing more.

”Yes.” Solemnly.

”For how long?”--without looking up.

”Perhaps, forever.” Tragically.

”You are better at making a fire than I had supposed. Will you give me Dix?” This with the flash of a dimple.

”I--I--yes--if you want him.”

I glanced at her face just in time to see the dimples disappear. ”I am thinking of being married next week.” My heart stopped beating.

”You were--what?”

”But of course, if you are going away I could not do it, could I?” Her eyes sought mine, then fell.

”Eleanor!” I tried to possess myself of her hand; but she put it behind her. I tried to secure the other; but that also disappeared. Then I took--herself. ”Eleanor!” Her face next second had grown grave. She looked up suddenly and looked me full in the eyes.

”You are a goose. What would you think if I were to say I would marry you right away?” She looked down again quickly, and her face was sweet with tenderness.

I was conscious of a sudden drawing in of my breath, and a feeling as if I were rising into the sky, ”rimmed by the azure world.” Then my brain began to act, and I seemed to have been lifted above the darkness. I was up in the sunlight again.

”I should think I was in Heaven,” I said quietly, almost reverently.

”But for G.o.d's sake, don't say that to me unless you mean it.”

”Well, I will. I have written my father. Write to Mr. Marvel and ask him to come here.”

I have never known yet whether this last was a piece of humor. I only know I telegraphed John Marvel, and though I rode all night to do so, I thought it was broad daylight.

In the ripe autumn John Marvel, standing before us in his white surplice in the little chapel among the oaks and elms which had been his first church, performed the ceremony that gave me the first prize I had really striven for--the greatest any man on earth could have won.

Still, as often as I spoke of my future plans, there was some secret between them: a shadowy suggestion of some mystery in which they both partic.i.p.ated. And, but that I knew John Marvel too well, I might have been impatient. But I knew him now for the first time as she had known him long.

On our arrival in the city, after I had given the driver an order where to go, she gave another, and when the carriage drew up, it was not at my hotel, but at the door of the sunny house on the corner where I had first seen Eleanor Leigh come tripping down the steps with her parcels for the poor little crippled child and her violets for the Miss Tippses.

Springing out before me, with her face radiant with joy and mystery, she tripped up the steps now just as the door was flung open by a butler who wore a comical expression of mingled pleasure and solemnity, for the butler was Jeams, and then having introduced him to me, she suddenly took the key from the lock, and handing it to me with a bow and a low laugh of delight:

”I make you, sir, livery of seisin.”

This, then, was the mystery.