"If you should come to us, to me and my father, you would be a queen on a throne. If you could love me just a little in return—"
She could not answer, she just stood looking up at him, and suddenly his arms went around her. "Tell me, beloved."
An hour later they went in to his father, and after that Emily was lifted up on the wings of an enthusiasm which left her breathless, but beatified. "I knew when I first saw you what we desired," said the old man, "and my son knew. All that I have is yours both now and afterwards—"
Dinner was a candle-lighted feast, with heart-shaped ices at the end.
"How sure you were," Emily told her lover, smiling.
"I was not sure. But I set the stage for success. It was only thus that I kept up my courage. There were so many chances that the curtain might drop on darkness—," his hand went over hers. "If it had been that way, I should have let the ices melt and the violets die—."
After dinner they went over the house. "Why should we wait," Ulrich had said, "you and I? There is nothing to wait for. Tell me what you want changed in this old house, and then come to it, and to my heart."
It was, she found, such a funny old place. It had been furnished by men, and by German men at that. There was heaviness and stuffiness, and all the bric-a-brac was fat and puffy, and all the pictures were highly-colored, with the women in them blonde and buxom, and the men blond and bold—.
But Ulrich's room was not stuffy or heavy. The windows were wide open, and the walls were white, and the cover on the canopy bed was white, and there were two pictures, one of Lincoln and one of Washington, and that was all.