The old fellow grinned at him like a boy.
"That girl Belinda," he said, "would marry you in her cap and apron if you said the word. By Hannah! boy, you don't realize yet what sort of a woman you've got in her."
"Oh, don't I?" the young man returned. "Don't you fool yourself, Captain."
Captain Dexter's plan was carried out. The embassy was American soil. They needed no special marriage license.
Even Aunt Roberta did not demand conformance with French custom. To tell the truth, since Belinda and Frank had decided, because of their wounds, to spend the furloughs granted them in New York, Aunt Roberta had been only too anxious to depart from that "so-dear Paris." She did not talk of it much, but after ten years in America, Paris had been a distinct disappointment to the taut little Frenchwoman.
"Besides," she confessed to her niece, "I am anxious to see that dear Old Saybrook—a spot très charmant, I am sure. Ma foi, oui! Le capitaine wrote long ago to his three daughters, Mesdames Prudence, Patience and Penelope, to tell them he would marry me. Though for my part I do not see how he could know that, when at the time he had not yet asked me," she added innocently. "But le Capitaine Dexter is so masterful.
"And so the Mesdames Prudence, Patience and Penelope have all written to me asking me to visit them. Ma foi! In marrying le capitaine I marry a family, do I not?"
To Belinda Frank said:
"I presume my brother Jim will rake me over the coals for enticing you into matrimony. To be an airman's wife——"
"But you fly for our country, Frank—for America! She needs you, as she needs me. We Americans have entered this war with noble intent. As our forefathers fought for freedom and democracy for us in seventy-six, so we must now fight for the same good gifts for all the world."