"I can't say. The fair Julia may have hustled him away before I'm back."
"If—if you should see him," said Agatha, her lips white, "try to make him think kindly of me. Try to make him understand that I didn't realize that I was doing anything wrong."
"To be sure I will," replied Warren with misleading heartiness. "But if a man is such a blasted fool as to need that assurance, it's not worth troubling your little head about him, don't you see?" And then he said good-by again and went off in an unprecedentedly bad humor, damning Forbes whole-heartedly all the way to town.
Warren's call left Miss Finch pleasurably excited. For a man to come out from the city for a few hours' talk with a girl, argued his intentions serious. And Agatha's abstraction, the dreamy look in her eyes, the irrelevant nature of her replies to the simplest questions, seemed to imply a gratifying responsiveness in her mood. Little did the innocent spinster dream that Agatha's absorption was due to calculating the wisest expenditure of an income derived from an investment of fifteen thousand dollars in first mortgages at six per cent.
But Miss Finch's elation was short-lived, for Howard came home with a startling piece of news. "Heard the funniest thing to-day. Who do you suppose has been getting married?"
To please him Agatha hazarded a guess. Howard shook his head.
"It's the last one you'd ever think of. Old Billy-goat Wiggins. He married a widow out on the Jericho pike and I guess he's had six or seven wives already."
Without attempting to correct her brother's exaggeration, Agatha cast an apprehensive glance in Miss Finch's direction. Miss Finch met her look with an air of resolute calm. At last the matter was settled. Now that one of her lovers was out of the running, the only thing left was to take the other. Her days of anxious deliberation, due to weighing one man against his rival, were over, and it was a great relief. "Mrs. James Doolittle," said Miss Finch to herself and blushed high. Well, Doolittle was as good a name as Wiggins. "I b'lieve if anything, it's a little more aristocratic," Miss Finch decided.
But as the evening wore on, she found herself disquieted. In her thoughts of James Doolittle there was little of roseate illusion. She saw him mentally as she had seen him uncounted times in reality, his trousers patched and bagging at the knees, his shirt soiled and faded, his hat suggesting that some predatory animal had taken frequent bites out of the rim. "I do like a man to look neat," sighed Miss Finch. She recalled too, the tumbledown cottage where James Doolittle had kept bachelor's hall since his mother's death six years earlier, and compared it disadvantageously with her present quarters. Romance had spread her wings, and taken flight. Marriage had become a very drab, prosaic affair. But there was no help for it.
Miss Finch retired to her room rather early and wrote Mr. Doolittle accepting the offer of marriage made nearly two months before. It was a prim little note and if her delay had been unflattering, there was nothing in her formula of acceptance to restore the masculine amour propre. She said that marriage was a very serious matter, and she hoped they were making no mistake. She signed her name Zaida Finch, and realizing that the compact signature would soon be replaced by that of an unknown female, Zaida Doolittle, she shed some agitated tears.