“Shall we try a Patience?” she said.
He accepted with a wistful alacrity which seemed to say it was the most he hoped for, and they drew up a table and sat down opposite each other, calmly disposing the little cards in elaborate patterns.
They had been playing for about half an hour when she rumpled up the cards abruptly, and sweeping them together into a passionate heap cried out: “I want it to be a gay wedding—the gayest wedding that ever was! I’m determined it shall be a gay wedding.”
She dropped her face into her hands, and sat there propping her elbows on the card-table, and laughing out between her intercrossed fingers: “A really gay wedding, you know....”
XXVII.
ONLY three days more now; for just three days more she and Anne would live under one roof.
And then?
The interrogation was not Anne’s. The news of Mrs. Clephane’s intended marriage had completely restored the girl’s serenity. Chris Fenno, detained in Baltimore by his mother’s sudden and somewhat alarming illness, had not yet reappeared; it seemed likely now that he would arrive in New York only the day before the wedding. Anne was to have her mother to herself to the last; and with every art of tenderness and dependence she tried to show her appreciation of these final days, sweet with the sweetness of dear things ending, yet without pain because they were not to precede a real separation. Her only anxiety—the alarm about Mrs. Fenno—had been allayed by a reassuring telegram, and she moved within that rainbow bubble that once or twice in life contrives to pass itself off as the real horizon.
The sight of her, Kate Clephane reasoned, ought to have been justification enough. Anything was worth doing or sacrificing to keep the bubble unbroken. And the last three days would pass—the Day itself would pass. The world, after it was over, would go on in the same old way. What was all the flurry about?
Mrs. Drover did not find it easy to maintain so detached an attitude. She, for one, could not conceive how her sister-in-law could remain so calm at such a moment.