"You can't marry her, Dick," Mabel remonstrated, "there isn't time. But if you will trust me again beyond this, I promise to be as nice to her as you would like me to be."
"But I can, and what's more, I will," Dick answered. "I've shilly-shallied long enough. If she'll have me, and it would serve me jolly well right if she turned me down—it shall be a special licence at a registry office on Saturday morning. My train doesn't leave till two-thirty." He stood up very tall and straight. Mabel thought she had never seen him look so glad to be alive. "And now," he added, "I am going straight across to ask her. Wish me luck, Mabel."
She stood up, too, and put both her hands on his. "You aren't angry with me?" she whispered. "Dick, from the bottom of my heart, I do wish you luck, as you call it."
"Angry? Lord bless you, no!" he said, and suddenly he bent and kissed her. "You've argued about it, Mabel, but then I always knew you would argue. I trust you to be good to her after I'm gone; what more can I say?"
CHAPTER XXX
| "But love is the great amulet which makes the World a Garden." |
Robert Louis Stevenson.
Colonel Rutherford and Joan had had breakfast early that morning, for Uncle John was going to London to attend some big meeting, at which, much to his own secret gratification, he had been asked to speak. He rehearsed the greater part of what he was going to say to Joan during breakfast, and on their way down to the station. He had long ago forgiven, or forgotten, which was more probable still, Joan's exile from his good graces. After Aunt Janet's funeral, when Joan had spoken to him rather nervously, suggesting her return to London, he had stared at her with unfeigned astonishment.
"Back to London," he had said, "whatever for?"