"They don't deserve it—but it's damnably true that they get it," he mused, irrelevantly.
"Joan's room is a dream, Nan, come and see it!" called Doris, and Nancy could be heard running and laughing to inspect the Prodigal's quarters.
"It looks divine!" she ejaculated. "Push that pink dogwood back a little, Aunt Dorrie—make it like a frame around the mirror for the dear's face."
"How's that, Nan?"
"Exactly—right. Aunt Dorrie?"
"Yes, my dear girl."
"I have the dearest plan—I feel that Ken would love it, but I hate to be the one to propose it."
From his armchair Martin smiled more broadly.
"Perhaps I can do it for you, Nan." Doris spoke abstractedly—she was, apparently, giving more thought to the decorations for the returning wanderer than to the plans of the good child who had remained at her post.
"Well, Aunt Doris, I don't want to wait until next winter to be married. Ken writes that he will have Mrs. Tweksbury safely settled in New York by the first of June——" Emily Tweksbury had fled the influenza and gone to Bermuda only to fall victim to pneumonia. Kenneth Raymond had been summoned, to what was supposed to be her death-bed, but which she indignantly refused to accept as such.