With the incredibility of their miracle still stamped almost embarrassingly on their faces, our Bride-and-Groom-of-a-Week completed the list. It wasn't just the material physical fact that Love was consummated, that gave them that look. But the spiritual amazement that Love was consummatable! No other "look" in life ever compasses it, ever duplicates it!
It made my Husband quite perceptibly quicken the tempo of his jocosity.
"One—two—three—four—five—six—seven," he enumerated. "All good guests come straight from Heaven! One—two—three— four—five—six—Seven—" he repeated as though to be perfectly sure, "seven? Why—Why, what the——?" he interrupted himself suddenly.
With frank bewilderment I saw him jump back to the rear step of the bus and flash his light into the farthest corner where the huddled form of an eighth person loomed weirdly from the shadows.
It was a man—a young man. And at first glimpse he was quite dead. But on second glimpse, merely drunk. Hopelessly,— helplessly,—sodden drunk, with his hat gone, his collar torn away, his haggard face sagging like some broken thing against his breast.
With a tension suddenly relaxed, a faint sigh seemed to slip from the group outside. In the crowding faces that surrounded us instantly, it must have been something in young Kennilworth's expression, or in the Pomeranian's, that made my Husband speak just exactly as he did. With his arms held under the disheveled, uncouth figure, he turned quite abruptly and scanned the faces of his guests, "And whose little pet—may this be?" he asked trenchantly.
From the shadow of the Porte-cochere somebody laughed. It was rather a vacuous little laugh. Sheer nerves! Rollins, I think.
Framed in the half-shuttered window of the bus the May Girl's face pinked suddenly like a flare of apple blossoms.
"He—came with—me," said the May Girl.
No matter how informally one chooses to run his household there is almost always some one rule I've noticed on which the smoothness of that informality depends.