“I’m so happy—I feel as if I should die,” she said.
Then they forgot Mrs. Atterton and everything else but themselves in the lovely view that opened out before them; for they were now almost at the end of that enchanted lane which leads to the City of Married Love—the Enchanted Muddle. And the tall spires towered so close and glorious, the mean streets lay in such a tender haze, the golden gates were so nearly opening, that their happy eyes were blinded to all else in the world beside.
But Mrs. Atterton had not been wandering in the enchanted lane, and she had lived in that city for such a long time that she had forgotten how it looked from the outside, so naturally she felt astonished.
“Elizabeth!” was all she could gasp.
Then Andy and Elizabeth did look back along the shining lane, and see an unimportant figure in the distance which, they vaguely felt, they might find of some importance again, sometime.
“We said good-bye for ever—that night I dined at the Stamfords—it was too late,” explained Elizabeth incoherently.
“Then why?” began Mrs. Atterton, but she could get no further, she was so bewildered.
“I thought I had lost her for ever—and now she’s mine,” said Andy, as much to an astonished universe as to his future mother-in-law.
However, they did manage in the end to make it clear, so far as any one could, how the whole thing had happened; and then Mrs. Atterton was so simply glad with them that even two young lovers in the first engrossment of their new joy could not fail to be touched by her attitude.
“Oh, mother—I don’t believe you care about anything in the world so long as we three children are happy,” said Elizabeth, laughing and crying and clinging to her. And in that moment she realised for the first time something of what it means to be a mother.