"Doris, my child—you are quite sure——" He could not have his son defrauded of any sweetness.
Doris raised her downcast eyes and smiled, while the pink flush was like a rosy gleam of sunrise. Then she laid her hand over both of the others' in a tender, caressing fashion. But she was too deeply moved for words.
Winthrop Adams kissed her fair brow, but her lover kissed her on the sweet, rosy lips.
They announced the engagement almost at once. It was done partly for De la Maur's sake, though after the first he took it quite philosophically. There were three people supremely happy over it. Miss Recompense, Madam Royall,—who declared she would have been disappointed in Providence if it had been any other way,—and Cousin Betty, who was happy as a queen in her own life, though why we should make royalty a synonym for happiness I do not know.
"You never could have left Uncle Win," wrote Betty, "and Cary could not have gone away, neither could he have brought home a strange woman. This was the only satisfactory ending. But I hope you will be awfully in love with each other and sweet—and silly and all that. I am sorry for Captain Hawthorne, for, Doris, he loved you sincerely, but your French cousin can console himself with an English rhyme:
"'If she be not fair for me,
What care I how fair she be?'"
And oddly enough a few months later he did console himself with Eudora Chapman.
Just a few years afterward there was a great time in Boston. For she had adopted a charter and become a real city, after long and earnest discussion. There was a grand celebration and no end of dinners, and young Cary Adams made one of the addresses. Mr. Winthrop Adams insisted that his life work was done, but he lived to be interested in many more improvements, and some charming grandchildren.
"But after all," Doris would declare, "splendid as it is going to be, I am glad to belong to Old Boston with her lanes and byways and rough hills and marsh lands, with their billowy grasses and wild flowers, and great gardens full of fruit trees, and the little old shops and people sitting on front stoops sewing or reading or chatting cozily. And what a pleasure it will be by and by to tell the children that I was a little girl in Old Boston."
THE END.