And the young Doctor held her very close and never answered a word she said. The strain on him had been very great and he was more shaken than he wanted her to see. But from the depths of her heart she understood and pressed closer to him as she gave him a long silence in which to recover himself. Twilight was coming in the windows and a fragrant night breeze was ruffling her hair against his cheek before she stirred in his arms.
"We've got to ask—to ask Mother before—before," she was venturing to suggest in the smallest of voices in which was both mirth and tenderness, when a low laugh answered her from the doorway.
"Oh, no you don't," said Mother Mayberry, as she beamed upon them with the most manifest joy. "I had done picked you out before you had been here more'n a week, honey-bird. You can have him and welcome if you can put up with him. He's like Mis' Peavey always says of her own jam; 'Plenty of it such as it is and good enough what they is of it.' A real slow-horse love can be rid far and long at a steady gate. He ain't pretty, but middling smart." And the handsome young Doctor's mother eyed him with a well-assumed tolerance covering her positive rapture.
"Are you sure, sure you're not disappointed about—about that peony-girl?" demanded the singer lady, as she came into the circle of Mother Mayberry's arm and nozzled her little nose under the white lawn tie.
"Le'me see," answered Mother Mayberry in a puzzled tone of voice. "I seem to understand you, but not to know what you are talking about."
"The girl to whom he gave the graduating bouquet with Mrs. Peavey's peony in it," she whispered, but not so low that the Doctor, who had come over and put a long arm around them both, couldn't hear.
"Well," answered Mother Mayberry in a judicial tone of voice as she bestowed a quizzical glance on the Doctor, who blushed to the roots of his hair at this revelation of the fact of his Mother's indulgence in personal reminiscence, "I reckon Miss Alford'll be mighty disappointed to lose him, but I don't know nothing about her riz biscuits. Happiness and good cooking lie like peas in a pod in a man's life and I reckon I'll have to give Tom Mayberry, prize, to you."
"Mother!" exclaimed the Doctor.
"Thank you," murmured Miss Wingate with a wicked glance at him from his Mother's shoulder that brought a hurried embrace down upon them both.
"Children," said Mother Mayberry, as she suddenly reached put her strong arms and took them both close to her breast, "looks like the Lord sometimes hatches out two birds in far apart nests just to give 'em wing-strength to fly acrost river and hill to find each other. You both kinder wandered foreign some 'fore you sighted one another, but now you can begin to build your own nest right away, and I offers my heart as a bush on Providence Nob to put it in."