"I cannot say. One never knows whom one may meet in California."
They were leaving the elevator, following a boy with keys to their rooms. "I hope we shall not be surprised on every side," the man persisted. Isabel caught his hand.
"Never mind," she whispered, "I'll take care of you. But you must be nice to Gay Lewis. We are simply destined to meet the world over, and Gay has a way of saying things." The bell boy was beyond hearing distance. "Not that she has anything to say about us of slightest interest to strangers," she hastened to add. Philip saw the flush on her cheeks. Was she already beginning to dread unavoidable notoriety? The thought sobered him. Now he understood. But Isabel should not suffer, if being polite to every one in Christendom could help matters.
"I shall bend to 'the higher criticism,' do my best to impress Miss Lewis," he declared with assumed gayety.
Then Isabel exclaimed as the door to their spacious sitting-room flew open. The place was a bower of roses. "Did you tell them to do it?" she asked.
Philip forgot a passing shadow and smiled an affirmative answer.
"It is lovely! the loveliest room I was ever in," she declared. "How dear of you." Philip stopped by the window, enjoying his wife's girlish joy. She sank her face into every separate bunch of flowers. "Oh, these dear, dear pink ones!" she cried.
American Beauties nodded above her head, and she stood on a footstool to inhale their fragrance. On a round table covered with a white cloth was a huge bowl of "bride roses," fitting emblem for the day. Philip's surprise had been perfect. The delicate forethought which had ordered her bower, which stipulated for the little dinner to be served in the sitting-room, away from curious eyes, touched her beyond words. Her husband was indeed a lover! She ran to him with outstretched arms. As never before she knew the depth of a long-denied moment. And later, when she laid aside her coat and hat, to sit at the first little dinner alone,—but for the deferential waiter coming in and going out,—she kept thinking of all that they had in store, of their happiness to come.
Philip was never as gay, never so like the boy of years back—the boy who had loved the girl. Both were beginning over again and time between had taught them the price of joy.
"On this night we toast each other," said Philip, lifting his glass. "There is just 'one cold bottle' for our 'little hot bird'! I drink to my wife!"