“I believe I will make a vow never to speak to a young man again!” she exclaimed, tearfully.
“You might do something more sensible than that—marry me soon, and you will no longer be a temptation to young men who go crazy over a pair of blue eyes,” said Norman de Vere.
She blushed, and trilled saucily:
“‘I’m ow’re young to marry yet.’”
“If you put off the wedding-day long, I shall be getting gray. You would not like that,” he answered, getting in return the sweetest, shyest look of love that seemed to bid defiance to the frosty encroachments of age.
But by and by she found that he was quite in earnest in pleading for an early marriage. He did not want to seem selfish, but he knew in his heart that it would be better to marry Thea as soon as possible, and take her away from Verelands, lest some echo of the vile rumors that had been circulating should reach her ears and sully her pure spirit with their venom.
“Mother, what is to hinder your taking Sweetheart to New York at once and ordering the wedding things for a month hence?” he asked; and Mrs. de Vere replied that it would please her very much to do so.
“The wedding and traveling-dress after all will be the most we will have to buy there, for if you go abroad on your wedding-tour, Sweetheart can get lots of pretty things in Paris,” she said.
“Paris? Oh!” cried the girl, in a rapture of pleasure.
“Then you will like to go abroad?” her lover asked, smiling; and she clapped her pretty hands in childish delight, and offered no objections to being married in a month. She said, naïvely, no one would think of falling in love with her for her eyes and curls when she was a married woman, and though Norman smiled at that, he did not contradict her assertion.