ou have any objection to
our being married. We would like to do so as soon as possible--if you do
not object."

He turned my face to his, and the look in his eyes was grand. It meant
no matter who objected, marry her he would; but it was a way to tell
me--the way he was asking, and I understood.

"It depends," I said, and, as I am always playing parts to myself, right
on the spot I was a chaperon lady. "It depends on whether you love
enough. Do you?"

"I do. For myself I am entirely sure. As to Katherine--Suppose she tells
you what she thinks."

I turned toward her. "Do you, Miss Katherine? It takes--I guess it takes
a lot of love to stand marriage. Do you think you have enough?"

In the moonlight her face changed like her opal ring when the cream
becomes pink and the pink red.

"I think there is," she said. Then: "Oh, Mary Cary, why are you such a
strange, strange child?" And she threw her arms around me and kissed me
twenty times.

After a while, after we'd talked and talked, and they'd told me things
and I'd told them things, I said I'd consent.

"But if the love ever gives out, I'm not going to stay with you," I
said. "I'm never going to be fashionable and not care for love. A home
without it is hell."

"Mercy, Mary!" Uncle Parke jumped. "Don't use such strong language. It
isn't nice."

"But it's true. I read it in a book, and I've watched the Rices. When
there's love enough you can stand anything. When there isn't, you can
stand nothing. Living together every day you find out a lot you didn't
know, and love can't keep still. It's got to grow or die."

Then I jumped up. "I always could talk a lot about things I didn't
understand," I said. "But I consent." And I flew down the road and left
them.

I've written it out on a piece of paper, about their being engaged, and
looked at it by night and by day since they told me about it. I've said
it low, and I've said it loud, but I can't realize it, and the little
sense the Lord gave me He has taken away.

They say I did it. Say I'm responsible for every bit of it, and that I
will have to look after them all the rest of their lives to see that I
didn't make a mistake in writing that letter. And that I'm to go to
Europe with them on their wedding tour and live with them always and
always. And--oh!--I believe my heart is going to burst with miserable
happiness and happy miserableness, and my head feels like it's in a
bag.

Dr. Parke Alden and Miss Katherine