I heard Wiggins laugh in the hall, and Miss Octavia raised her head. Then Cecilia came into the room, and walked directly to her aunt.
"Aunt Octavia, here is the little silver notebook you gave me in Paris; I have just written Mr. Wiggins's name in it, and as I have no further use for the book, I return it with my love and thanks."
Without a word, Miss Octavia turned to the wall and pressed the button twice.
"William," she said as the butler appeared, "you may serve Oriana '97, and be careful not to freeze it to death; and the hour for dinner is changed to eight. Arnold, you may yourself drive to Gooseberry Bungalow for my brother and niece. They dine with me to-night."
Hezekiah and I built our bungalow in the orchard where on that October afternoon I found her munching a red apple on the stone wall. She is the most scrupulous of housewives, and only now took me to task for scattering the hearth with fragments of the notes from which this narrative has been written. She has just been reading these last pages, with meditative brown eyes, and not without occasionally reaching for the pen and retouching some sentence in which, she says, soot from my chimney-doctoring days has clogged the ink. Cecilia and Wiggins live at Hopefield across the fields. Miss Octavia insisted on this, for the reason that the sword of Hartley's great-grandfather, found in the chest under the old house, gives him inalienable rights to the premises. Miss Octavia and her brother Bassford are traveling abroad and enjoying those mild adventures to which they are both temperamentally inclined. As Miss Octavia carried with her the Parker House umbrella-check I am confident of her early return.
My name is joined to Pepperton's on his office-door. Pepperton proposed this arrangement, with so many assurances of faith in me that I could not refuse him; but I knew well enough that Miss Octavia had first put it into his head. So while I have called myself a chimney-doctor in these pages, I am again an architect, and the new cathedral now rising at Waxahaxie is, let me modestly note, the work of my hand.
"You ought to say something more about the Asolando," Hezekiah has just murmured at my shoulder. "Everybody will ask whether we ever went back there."
"Of course we go back there, Hezekiah, every time you come to town and can get hold of me. Will that be enough?"
"You'd better explain that Aunt Octavia started the tea-room and still owns it, and makes money out of it, though she rarely goes there, but sends Freda the maid to collect the profits. And it won't do any harm to say that when she met you there that day, she decided at once that you would be a proper husband for me. Any one who reads your book will want to know that."
Hezekiah is always right; so here endeth the chronicle.