Marjorie kissed me on the lips, then raised her face and dried her eyes. Suddenly she sprang to her feet, and I could not but admit how very good she was to look upon. Her dark hair hung loose about her shoulders; she allowed herself no curl-paper nonsense, and indeed no device could have added to the beauty of her waving locks. She was still in her night dress, although she had drawn on something warm about her feet, and, like the good wife she was always to be, she had started the fire—a duty which I admitted properly fell to the man of the house. Perhaps it is because a man should start the fire that he so greatly enjoys having his wife do it. I could hear the poplar sticks crackling as I lay watching her through moist and dreamy eyes. She was good to look upon; so different from Jean, but still so good!
"Hustle up, Frank," she cried, with a sudden return to her normal manner. "We have a lot to do to-day."
It was not until after our midday meal that I went over to Twenty-two. Jean was in her room, but I mustered the spirit to chaff Jack with such a mingling of good wishes and humorous sallies as my brain could command, and we finished the whole with an impromptu sparring match in the middle of the kitchen floor.
"Watch your beak, old Sitting Crow!" I commanded, "or I'll send you to the minister with a busted mug," and I swung on him with enthusiasm. But Jack was handy with his fists, and something thumped in my eye like a piledriver.
"Aha!" said he. "The first of the wedding decorations. Let's make it a pair."
But at that moment Jean came out, looking so radiantly sorrowful, if one can look that way, that the glory of Marjorie seemed as the glory of one of the lesser planets against the sun. She came to me with an outstretched hand.
"Merry Christmas, Frank," she said, looking me squarely in the face. "Why, what has happened to your eye?"
"I was just practising," said Jack, "and I want to exhibit this specimen of my handiwork to Marjorie before we are married. It is as well that she should understand——"
But Jean was gone in quest of butter, with which she rubbed my swelling eye, and the caress of her fingers was worth the punch it had cost.
It was now time to hitch the oxen to the rough sleigh or jumper which Jack and I had built. Into this the four of us could with some difficulty be packed, and as we reckoned it would take at least an hour for Buck and Bright to break trail to Spoof's, we loaded up and started on our journey at a little before two. Spoof had insisted that the ceremony should take place at his house, if for no other reason that there might be a honeymoon trip as far as from Two to Fourteen, and the minister was expected at three.