“We’ll have the wedding in the gardens, save all the fuss and waste of picking the flowers, be ever so much prettier, and everybody and his neighbor can come.”
When Hennessy heard of it he shirred his mouth into a pucker and whistled ecstatically. “’Tis like her, just! Married out-o’-doors wi’ the growin’ things to stand up wi’ her and the blessed sun on her head. Faith, Hennessy will have to be scrubbin’ up the swans an’ puttin’ white satin bows round their necks.”
Sheila chose the hour before sunset on an early day of June, and the San speedily set itself to the task of praying off the rain and arranging the delightful details of attendants, refreshments, music, and all the other non-essentials of a successful wedding. Miss Maxwell, the superintendent of nurses, took the trousseau in hand and portioned out piles of napery and underwear to the eager hands of the nurses to embroider. The whole sanitarium was suddenly metamorphosed into a Dorcas Society; patients forgot to be querulous, and refused extra rubbings and all unnecessary tending, that more stitches might be taken in the twenty-four hours of the hospital day. A great rivalry sprang up between the day and night nurses as to which group would finish the most, and old Mr. Crotchets, the cynical bachelor with liver complaint and a supposedly atrophied heart, offered to the winning shift the biggest box of candy New York could put up.
Through the first days of her happiness Sheila walked like a lambent being of another world, whose radiance was almost blinding. Those who had known her best, who had felt her warmth and beauty in spite of that bitterness which had been her shield against the hurt she had battled with so long, looked upon her now with unfathomable wonder. And Peter, who had worshiped her from the moment she had taken his hand and led him back to the ways of health, watched her as the men of olden times must have watched the goddesses that occasionally graced their earth.
“Beloved, you’re almost too wonderful for an every-day, Sunday-edition newspaper-man like me,” Peter whispered to her in the hush of one twilight, as they sat together in the rest-house, watching Hennessy feed the swans.
“Every woman is, when the miracle of her life has been wrought for her. Man of mine,” and Sheila reached out to Peter’s ever waiting arms, “wouldn’t God be niggardly not to let me seem beautiful to you now?”
Peter laughed softly. “If you’re beautiful now, what will you be when—”
Sheila hushed him. “Listen, Peter, our happiness frightens me, it’s so tremendous for just two people—almost more than our share of life. I know I seem foolish, but long ago I made up my mind I should have to do without love and all that goes with it, and now that it has come—sorrow, death, never frightened me, but this does.”
“Glad I have the courage for two, then. Look here, Leerie, the more happiness we have the more we can spill over into other lives and the brighter you can burn your lamp for the ones in the dark. This old world needs all the happiness it can get now. So?”
Sheila smiled, satisfied. “You always understand. If I ever write out a prescription for love, I shall make understanding one-third of the dose. Let’s go into partnership, Brooks and O’Leary, Distillers and Dispensers of Happiness.”