IV
Let us drop details. Good luck came to young Jones, hard on the lonely heels of his evacuation of Albany. He was named a junior partner of a New York City law firm. His income equalled his hope. He dismissed whiskey and draw poker, and he wrote to Mary Van Epps:
“Could he claim her now?”
Colonel Stuyvesant Van Epps said “No” again. Young Jones still lacked ancestry, and a taste for whiskey and four aces still lurked in his blood. Colonel Stuyvesant Van Epps would not consent. This served for a time to abate the bridal preparations.
V
Two years deserted the future for the past. A great deal of water will run under a bridge in two years. Mary Van Epps was nineteen. She went on a visit to a Trenton relative. Young Jones became abundant in Trenton at that very time. They took in a parson while on a stroll one day, and when that experienced divine got through with them they were man and wife. They wired their entangled condition to Colonel Stuyvesant Van Epps. He sent them a message of wrath.
“I cast Mary off for ever! Never let me see her face again!”
“Very well!” remarked young Jones as he read the wire; “I shall need Mary myself, in New York. Casting her off, therefore, at Albany, cuts no great figure. As for Mary's face, I will look at it all the more to make up for her brutal dad's abatement of interest therein.”
Then he kissed Mary as if the feat were entirely fresh. And while Mary wept, she still felt very happy. Next they came to a modest home in the city.