"Mrs. Jones," he said calmly, "Rosa and I are married." As she got up hastily, the color rushing to her face, he added, "I believe my old friend the major would not have refused to give me his daughter."
It was a stroke of genius. Instead of uttering the angry words upon her lips the widow fell back upon her chair, crying. The major, dead, was not less the family oracle; and even the girls, who had burst into exclamations, and were not to be repressed for half an hour or so, felt that, irregular and shocking as the affair was, yet there was within it a grain of amelioration.
"But that she should have got married in a sixpenny calico!" exclaimed Caroline, tearfully. "I never shall get over that."
"I will buy her a gown or two in Paris," said the new brother-in-law. "We shall sail next week, and be gone a year, or perhaps longer."
But three years passed before the little house on Capitol Hill had to be vacated by its tenant in favor of the owners, who walked in upon the Jones family one day, when the harvest apples were ripe, and the two girls sat upon the porch of the farm-house paring a bowlful of them for supper.
"What is the change in Rosa?" mother and sisters asked each other when the pair had gone back to town the next morning. Mrs. Brent was even more beautiful than she had been as a girl. She did not look unhappy. Yet there was a difference.
The family found out what it meant when they began to visit the little house in town. Rosa had found another guide than her own sweet will. She no longer idled the days away, but sat patiently upon her little stool and painted from morning till late in the afternoon, while Brent—the personification of vigilance—hovered about, pipe in mouth, seeing to the thousand and one things about the house, which, except for his superintendence, kept itself, and dividing the rest of his attention between Rosa's canvas and his own.
"Do you know," said Caroline, indignantly, "that Rosa—our lazy little Rosa—has made fifteen hundred dollars the past year, while Brent has only made three hundred?"
"That's what he married her for," said Minnie, with a rapid inspiration. "I wondered what impelled him. I thought it wasn't love."
"My dear, he seems very fond of her," said Mrs. Jones, divided between a wish to cry and a wish to make the best of it.