to send him cards and a marked copy of the newspaper containing the
marriage notice."

Salemina told me all about it that night, but she never suspected the
interference of any deus ex machina save that of the traditional God of
Love, who, it seems to me, has not kept up with the requirements of the
age in all respects, and leaves a good deal for us women to do nowadays.

"Would that you had come up this aisle to meet me, Salemina, and that
you were walking down again as my wife!" This was what Dr. Gerald had
surprised her by saying, when the wedding music had finally entered
into his soul, driving away for the moment his doubt and fear and
self-distrust; and I can well believe that the hopelessness of his tone
stirred her tender heart to its very depths.

"What did you answer?" I asked breathlessly, on the impulse of the
moment.

We were talking by the light of a single candle. Salemina turned her
head a little aside, but there was a look on her face that repaid me for
all my labour and anxiety, a look in which her forty years melted away
and became as twenty, a look that was the outward and visible expression
of the inward and spiritual youth that has always been hers; then she
replied simply--"I told him what is true: that my life had been one long
coming to meet him, and that I was quite ready to walk with him to the
end of the world."

. . . . . .

I left her to her thoughts, which I well knew were more precious than my
words, and went across the hall, where Benella was packing Francesca's
last purchases. Ordinarily one of us manages to superintend such
operations, as the Derelict's principal aim is to make two garments go
where only one went before. Nature in her wildest moments never abhorred
a vacuum in her dominion as Miss Dusenberry resents it in a trunk.

"Benella," I said, in that mysterious whisper which one uses for such
communications, "Dr. La Touche has asked Miss Peabody to marry him, and
she has consented."

"It was full time!" the Derelict responded, with a deep sigh of relief,
"but better late than never! Men folks are so queer, I don't hardly know
how a merciful Providence ever came to invent 'em! Either they're so
bold they'd propose to the Queen o' Sheba without mindin' it a mite,
or else they're such scare-cats you 'bout have to ask 'em yourself, and
then lug 'em to the minister's afterwards--there don't seem to be no
halfway with 'em. Well, I'm glad yo