November 29th. How fast the days slip by! Milly came home early in the week, and yesterday was the Thanksgiving I prophesied about to David last spring.
Certainly I am going all about the house; and to emphasize my success as a seer we had a family gathering at Thanksgiving dinner. The bride and groom were here, of course, and Grace, who leaves as soon as Caro is married, and Cousin Jason—resplendent, by the way, in his dress-suit, which he considered a capital joke on Caro. Cousin Jane looked not a day over fifty, and Cousin Chad had done some furbishing himself to keep her company.
To think of a dinner party at Bird Corners again, after all these years! The Peon and I beamed at one another from the ends of the table; and in the centre, the bride and groom faced the bride-and-groom-to-be, with the older people tucked in at the corners. And it was all so good to see and hear—such a fairy tale come true—that, as I lie here today resting, I am just too happy for words.
David and Caro are to be married next Wednesday—married here, at Bird Corners. I dare not risk going to the church yet, and Cousin Jane’s is quite as far away. Besides, both the children want it here, and it is and always has been Caro’s home as well as David’s. Cousin Jane has really been sweet about it; and it is all settled that she and Caro are to come over in time for me to help dress the bride. Grace is coming tomorrow, and will stay with me until it is all over and she goes away herself.
December 9th. The wedding day was perfect—cloudless blue, and the little red wren singing his matins in the lilac almost before it was light. I am glad the child is a winter bride. She can afford to ignore the seasons, for she carries spring-time in her heart, like her namesake out of doors.
It was all beautiful, and I with my own hands helped to make it so. But nothing about it is very clear to me except the look in the children’s eyes—our children, both of them, at last. Caro’s joy had sobered her, so that she walked the earth in radiance, instead of fluttering, light-winged, above it; but David’s joy had set him on the heights. Oh, my son, my son, child of my soul always! I could not have borne the look upon his face if I had not known Caro through and through. But now I am not afraid.
Grace went the day after the wedding, and left me in a world where real and Make-Believe are blended into one. The Peon comes home early, and together we walk across the grass to the Perchery, and talk of how he wheeled me there in those sorrowful days last spring, when it seemed the knoll would never know the nest we longed to see there. And in the evening we sit in the firelight together, and hear the childish voices of long ago in the room, and childish feet in the hall. And we laugh over the good old days, and smile over the new days, which are better. And before I go to bed we go to the window and look at the children’s house, standing clear against the stars. And they come and stand beside us there, their tiny hands in ours—the dear, long-ago little children, who will be with us always, though the big children, dearer still, come and go across the grass between their home and ours.
THE END