“It is a deed transfer,” said the excited boy. “Yes, sir, it is! The whole rigmarole is here; the same thing said over half a dozen times, you know; and it’s for ‘Ray Forman Forsythe, her heirs and’—all the of it, and—Jean, it’s our house on Dupont Circle!”
“Nonsense!” from Jean. “How could it be? You are crazy, Dick Forman! ‘Much wedding cake has made you mad.’”
“Crazy or not I should hope I could still read! This is a deed of transfer, if I ever heard of one; and I heard of nothing else for a week; we had ’em in class; why, I even had to write—oh! I say—this is the greatest! Jean, this is from Aunt Elsie!”
After that, excitement in the gift room ran so high that Florence, who was helping to pack the bride’s travelling bag, came to see what was the matter. Brother and sister both talked at once, trying to explain, and finally pointed out the lines, that she might read for herself. As she read, her face grew white with excitement.
“What can it mean?” she cried. “What can it mean? It is our old home—and Ray’s name is here, and Aunt Elsie’s! I can’t understand it!”
Then all three went in haste for the bride and groom, almost literally carrying them by force to the gift room; talking the while so incoherently and so much in concert that not a suspicion of what they could mean reached Ray’s mind.
“Why, Jean, dear,” she said, laughing, “what is the matter? Have you all three gone daft?”
But when she read on the envelope her newly acquired name, and flushed over it, and laughed, a happy little laugh, and bent over the formidable document trying to make some sense from its strange-sounding legal phrases, and began to catch a glimmer of its possible meaning, and looked with startled eyes at her husband, and found him almost as amazed as herself, Aunt Elsie’s satisfaction in her carefully planned surprise ought to have been complete.
It is of no use to try to tell how that last hour, which had been more or less dreaded by all concerned, was spent. They could not have told, if they had tried. Almost the wedding itself, and the going out from the old home not to return, were forgotten in this new bewilderment and delight.
Perhaps it was well for all parties concerned that the clock moved steadily on without regard to legal transfers, or any such thing, and presently called out sharply the hour of ten; and the 10:40 train was the one that the bridal party were to take! After that, they left all the gifts and scurried about in haste.