“I? Never! I couldn’t. But I want to have it all in the book, so that when Foster and Mai are older they can read it.”
“I have no intention of sharing, even with our children, my under-the-rose idyl with the loveliest of girls. And when the children are older, they’ll be far more interested in their own heart secrets than they are in ours.”
“Still, dear,” she pleaded, “they may hear from others some unkind and perverted allusions to our story; for you know what foolish things were said at the time of our marriage.”
“If I remember rightly, some one—was it my mother or Mr. Whitely?”—
“Both,” she answered.
“—spread it abroad that I had trapped an heiress into marriage by means of an alias.”
“Wasn’t it a delicious version!” she laughed merrily. “But no matter what’s ever tattled in the future, if Foster and Mai have your journal, they will always understand it.”
“Maizie,” I urged, “if you let those imps of mischief read of our childish doings in this old library, they’ll either finish painting the plates in Kingsborough, or burn the house down in trying to realize an Inca of Peru at the stake.”
“But I won’t read them those parts,” she promised; “especially if you write a nice ending, which they’ll like.”
“Won’t it do to add just a paragraph, saying that our fairy godmamma found and gave you the journal, and that then we ‘lived happily ever after’?”