Ethel laughed. "I've known you to make love more ardently. Oh, yes. I have a very good memory. Still, I won't tell Vera. And now I'm going to write to your sister May and gloat over her. Of course I shall gloat, because I suggested getting you married off when we first heard you were coming home, and May got furious with me. Will you write too?"
Jimmy shook his head. "No, yours will do, at least for a start. I've got to write to Canon Farlow. Vera says he won't be home from Switzerland for another week. Otherwise, I would have gone to see him."
"He's rather an old stick, if I may say that of your beloved's father," Ethel went on. "You will find that out, and his sermons are very long, so don't live in his parish if you can help it. You'll have plenty of church in any case, you poor Jimmy."
"Why 'poor Jimmy,' when you've just been congratulating me?"
Ethel gave an impatient little sigh. "I don't know, I'm sure. Now I've done it I'm wondering if I was right. It's a big responsibility, and you may both end by hating me ever after. Promise me you won't, Jimmy, do promise that." Her voice had grown unusually earnest, and her eyes were suspiciously bright.
"Of course I promise, Ethel," he said gravely. "But I don't think there is much fear of my feeling anything except gratitude."
But Mrs. Grimmer was not satisfied. "I wish I had left it alone. I don't know how it is, but you're not the old Jimmy any longer, and I can't understand you. You're not half as happy as you ought to be under the circumstances. Now, are you?"
He protested vigorously against the idea, and yet he left her so entirely unconvinced that, instead of going to Vera, she sought out her husband and had a good cry on his shoulder.