"Opal was very sweet," Joyce announced, vouchsafing no details of the interview.
"The—Duchess was very sensible," was Robert's description of what passed between him and his exalted ex-mother-in-law.
"I suppose you asked them not to tell?" was my one question.
"Oh, Opal won't tell!" exclaimed Joyce; and I believed that she was right. According to Opal's view, telling things only helped them to happen.
"I begged the Duchess to say nothing to anybody," answered Robert. Our eyes met, and we smiled—Robert rather ruefully.
Of course the Duchess did the contrary of what she'd been begged to do, and said something to everybody. In less than a week the world was aware that Robert Lorillard, its lost idol, was coming back to life; that he who had been for a few months the husband of wonderful June Dana—the Duchess of Stane's daughter—was engaged to a "V.-A.-D. girl who'd nursed him in the war, and had been his secretary or something."
But, after all, the talk mattered very little to those most concerned. They were divinely happy, the two who were talked about, though they would have liked to be let alone. I suppose, for Robert, it was a different kind of happiness from that which the condescension of his goddess had given him: less dazzling perhaps; more like the warm sweetness of early spring and its flowers, compared with a tropical summer of scented magnolias and daturas. June had been a goddess stepping down from her golden pedestal, and Joyce was a loving, adoring human girl, ready for all that wifehood might mean.
Robert shut up the little place by the river (where they planned to live later), and stopped at an hotel in town, though he had never let the flat in St. James's Square, the scene of his engagement to June.
I began helping Joyce choose a trousseau that could be got together in haste, for they were to go to the south of France and Italy for their honeymoon; and one day, after shopping the whole morning and part of the afternoon, we were to meet Robert for tea at the Savoy.
You know that soft amber light there is in the big foyer of the Savoy at tea-time, like the beautiful subdued light in dreams? Since the war it brings back to me ghosts of all the jolly, handsome boys one used to see there, whose bodies sleep now under the poppies and bluets of France; and as Joyce and I walked in, rather late, the thought of those boys and those days came over me with the sobbing music of the violins.