“If you like. They will make a dreadful fuss. Can you ever put up with so many sisters-in-law?”
“I would put up with them if you had as many sisters as Hypermnestra;” and then, laughing happily, he told these four girls that they were soon to have a sister less and a brother more.
Hetty and Peggy received the news with whooping and clapping of hands, Sophy and Jenny with polite surprise. Was there ever anything so wonderful? Nothing could have been further from their thoughts. Little Mr. Tivett skipped and frisked like a young lamb in a meadow. Had Eve Marchant been his sister he could hardly have shown more delight.
The descent of the hill for Eve and Vansittart was a progress through pure ether. They knew not that their feet touched the earth. They were like the greater gods and goddesses in the Homeric Olympus. They started and they arrived. The labour of common mortals was not for them.
“Do you remember the legend of the blue flower of happiness which grows upon the mountain peak, and is said to fade and wither in the lower air?” asked Vansittart, close at his fiancée’s ear. “We have found the blue flower on the hilltop, Eve. God grant that for us the heaven-born blossom will keep its bloom even on the dull level of daily life.”
“Will our life be dull?” she questioned, in her shy sweet voice, as if she scarcely dared speak of her love louder than in a whisper. “I don’t think I can ever find life dull so long as you really care for me.”
“No, Eve, life shall not be dull. It shall be as bright and varied, and as full of change and gladness, as devoted love can make it. Your youth has not been free from care, dearest; and you have missed many of the pleasures which girls of your age demand as a right. But the arrears shall be made up. There shall be full measure of gladness in your married life, if I can make you glad. I am not what the modern world calls a rich man; but I am very far from poverty. I have enough for all the real pleasures of life—for travel, and books, and music, and the drama, and gracious surroundings, and kindly charities. The sting of narrow means can never touch my wife.”
“It can be a very sharp sting sometimes,” said Eve; and then, dropping again into that shy undertone, “But if you were ever so poor, and if you were a working man, and we had to live in that cottage under the beech tree, squatters, with only a key-holding, I think I could be perfectly happy.”
“Ah, that is what love always thinks, while the blue flower blooms; but when that mystic flower begins to fade there is some virtue in pleasant surroundings. Years hence, when you begin to be tired of me, and the blue flower takes a greyish shade, why, we can change the scene of our lives, wander far away, and in a new world I shall seem almost a new lover.”
“Will you ever take me to Italy?” she asked. “Italy has been the dream of my life, but I never thought it would be realized.”