“Only we haven’t much time,” he warned.
“There’s going to be time enough for Sally to be married properly,” she decided.
That was all there was to it. It seems that tucked away up in the attic there was an old trunk and tucked away in that a wedding dress of white silk which had been worn by Sally’s mother.
“It’s been kept ag’in’ this very day,” explained Mrs. Halliday, “though I will say that I was beginnin’ to git discouraged.”
The dress was brought out, and no more auspicious omen could have been furnished Mrs. Halliday than the fact that, except in several unimportant details, Sally could have put it on and worn it, just as it was. Not only did it fit, but the intervening years had brought back into style again the very mode in which it had been designed, so that, had she gone to a Fifth Avenue dressmaker, she could have found nothing more in fashion. Thus it was possible to set the wedding date just four days off, for Saturday. That was not one moment more of time than Mrs. Halliday needed in which to put the house in order––even with the hearty coöperation of Don, who insisted upon doing his part, which included the washing of all the upper windows.
Those were wonderful days for him. For one thing he discovered that not only had there been given into his keeping the clear-seeing, steady-nerved, level-headed woman who had filled so large a share of his life this last year, but also another, who at first startled him like some wood nymph leaping into his path. She was so young, so vibrant with 306 life, so quick with her smiles and laughter––this other. It was the girl in her, long suppressed, because in the life she had been leading in town there had been no playground. Her whole attention there had been given to the subjection of the wild impulses in which she now indulged. She laughed, she ran, she reveled in being just her care-free, girlish self. Don watched her with a new thrill. He felt as though she were taking him back to her early youth––as though she were filling up for him all those years of her he had missed.
At night, about the usual time he was dining in town, Mrs. Halliday insisted that Sally should go to bed, as she herself did, which, of course, left Don no alternative but to go himself. There was no possible object in his remaining up after Sally was out of sight. But the early morning belonged to her and to him. At dawn he rose and when he came downstairs, he found her waiting for him. Though Mrs. Halliday protested that Sally was losing her beauty sleep she was not able to produce any evidence to prove it. If any one could look any fresher or more wonderful than Sally, as 307 she stepped out of the house by his side into the light of the newborn day, then there was no sense in it, because, as she was then, she filled his eyes and his heart to overflowing. She wore no hat, but except for this detail he was never conscious of how she was dressed. There was always too much to occupy him in her brown eyes, in her mouth, which, while losing nothing of its firmness, had acquired a new gentleness. He had always thought of her lips as cold, but he knew them better now. At the bend in the road where he had kissed her first, he kissed her again every morning. She always protested. That was instinctive. But in the end she submitted, because it always seemed so many hours since she had seen him last, and because she made him understand that not until the next day could he expect this privilege.
“What’s the use of being engaged if I can’t kiss you as often as I wish?” he demanded once.
“We’re engaged in order to be married,” she explained.