"I know you have!" He smiled down at her, Peter's kind and radiant smile. "After day after day after to-morrow," he said, "I shall see to it that you never work too hard again!"
"Oh, Peter--you'll never be sorry?" she whispered.
"Sorry! My dearest child, when you give your beauty and your youth to a man almost twice your age, who has loved you all your life--do you think there is much chance of it?"
"Why SHOULDN'T it be one of the happy--marriages?" said Cherry after a silence.
"It will," he answered, confidently. "My dearest girl, I know something of life and its disappointments and disillusionments! And I tell you that I know that every hour you and I have together is going to be more wonderful than the hour before! I tell you that as the weeks become months, and the months become years, and the beauty and miracle of it go on and on, we will think that what we feel for each other now is only the shadow--the dream!"
"But the beginning will be wonderful enough!" Cherry mused. "You and I, breakfasting together, walking together, talking together, always just we two! But, Peter," she said, suddenly, "one of us might die!"
"Ah, THAT," he conceded, soberly, "that! It's all I'm afraid of, now!"
"I am terribly afraid of it!" said Cherry, beginning to tremble. "If you should die now, before Sunday! I never thought of it before--"
"You mustn't think of it now, and I won't!" he said, quickly. "Why, we have only two days to wait--!"
"Only two!" she echoed, nervously. "I promised him to-night that I would write to his mother about our coming--"