"We will defy Mrs. Grundy, my dear," Peter said, kissing the top of a soft brown braid, "by trotting off hand in hand tomorrow and getting ourselves married. Why, Alix, he gave us his consent years ago--don't you remember?"
"He DID wish it!" she said, and burst into tears.
"I seem to be doing things in a slightly irregular manner," she said to him the next day, when they had gotten breakfast together, and were basking in the sunlight of the upper deck of the ferryboat, on their way to the city. "I spend the night BEFORE my marriage alone--alone in a small country house hidden in the woods--with my betrothed, and propose to buy my trousseau immediately after the ceremony!"
"I feel like saying to you what the dear old French archbishop said to the small child," Peter smiled, marvelling a little nonetheless at her untouched serenity. "He was speaking to all the children in some institution, and came to this little one: 'ET TU ETES NEGRE? AH, BIEN--BIEN, CONTINUEZ--CONTINUEZ!' It's what makes you yourself, Alix, doing everything just a little differently."
"Marrying you, far from seeming a radical or momentous thing to do," she assured him, "seems to me like getting back into key--getting out of this bad dream of loneliness and change--securing something that I thought was lost!"
Her voice fell to a dreamy note, and she watched the gulls, wheeling in the sunshine, with thoughtful, smiling eyes. The man glanced at her once or twice, in the silence that followed, with something like hesitation, or compunction, in his look.
"Look here, Alix--let's talk. I want to ask you something. Or, rather, I want to tell you something--or, rather--"
"CONTINUEZ--CONTINUEZ!" she said, laughing, as he hesitated.
"There's never been anything--anything to tell you--or your father, if he was here," Peter said, flushed and a trifle awkward, "I'm not that kind of a man. I was a crippled kid, as you know, all for books and music and walks and older people. But there HAS been that one thing--that one woman--"
Flushed, too, she was looking at him with bright, intelligent eyes.