"It is done—it is arranged!" I replied. "I have already sent for the railway tickets. They will be at your home to-morrow night. All is settled. We are to be married on the eighteenth, and——"
"But our cards are all in Chicago and printed for the twenty-third!"
"What of that? Get some more—or, better still, forget 'em! We don't need cards."
"Never mind your sewing. Would you let a gown come between you and a chance to see the Needle Peak? I am determined that you shall see Ouray, Red Mountain, and the San Juan Divide."
At last she said, "I'll think about it."
She was obliged to think about it. All the forenoon, as the train ambled over the plain toward the village in which Professor Taft had established his bank, I kept it in her mind. "It may be a long time before we have another chance to visit Colorado. It will be glorious winter up there. Think of Marshall Pass, think of Uncompagre, think of the Toltec Gorge!" My enthusiasm mounted. "Ouray will be like a town in the Andes. We must plan to stay there at least two days."
She fell into silence, a dazed yet smiling silence, but when at last I said, "Every hour in the low country is a loss—let's be married to-morrow," she shook her head. I had gone too far.
She confessed that a stay in Hanover was in the nature of a punishment. "I never liked it here, and neither did my little mother," she said, and then she described her mother's life in Hanover. "I was called home to nurse her in the last days of her illness," she explained. "Poor little mamma! She came out here unwillingly in the first place, and I always resented her living so far away from the city. After her death I seldom came here. Father does not care. He is so absorbed in his business and in his books that it doesn't matter where he lives."
Professor Taft and his son, Florizel, were both at the train to meet Zulime, and both were properly amazed when I appeared. As a totally unexpected guest I was a calamity—but they greeted me cordially. What Zulime said in explanation of my presence I do not know, but the family accepted me as an inevitable complication.