ooked at it.

"We have been married," he said, "exactly fifty-four minutes."

"I can't believe it!" she said.

"If I love you like this after fifty-four minutes of married life, how
do you suppose I shall feel after fifty-four years of it?" He flung an
arm about her waist, and hid his face against her knee. "We are married,"
he said, in a smothered voice.

She bent over and kissed his thick hair, silently. At which he sat up
and looked at her with blue, eager eyes.

"It just came over me! Oh, Eleanor, suppose I hadn't got you? You said
'No' six times. You certainly did behave very badly," he said, showing
his white teeth in a broad grin.

"Some people win say I behaved very badly when I said 'Yes.'"

"Tell 'em to go to thunder! What does Mrs. Maurice Curtis (doesn't that
sound pretty fine?) care for a lot of old cats? Don't we _know_ that we
are in heaven?" He caught her hand and crushed it against his mouth. "I
wish," he said, very low, "I almost wish I could die, now, here! At your
feet. It seems as if I couldn't live, I am so--" He stopped. So--what?
Words are ridiculously inadequate things!... "Happiness" wasn't the name
of that fire in his breast, Happiness? "Why, it's God," he said to
himself; "_God._" Aloud, he said, again, "We are married!"

She did not speak--she was a creature of alluring silences--she just put
her hand in his. Suddenly she began to sing; there was a very noble
quality in the serene sweetness of her voice:

"O thou with dewy locks, who lookest down
Through the clear windows of the morning, ten
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!"

That last word rose like a flight of wings into the blue air. Her
husband looked at her; for a compelling instant his eyes dredged the
depths of hers, so that all the joyous, frightened woman in her
retreated behind a flutter of laughter.

"'O Spring!'" he repeated; "_we_ are Spring, Nelly--you and I.... I'll
never forget the first time I heard you sing that; snowing like blazes
it was,--do you remember? But I swear I felt this hot grass then in
Mrs. Newbolt's parlor, with all those awful bric-a-brac things around!
Yes," he said, putting his hand on a little sun-drenched bowlder jutting
from the earth beside him; "I felt this sun on my hand! And when you
came to 'O Spring!' I saw this sky--" He stopped, pulled three blades of
grass and began to braid them into a ring. "Lord!" he said, and his
voic