In the ripe autumn John Marvel, standing before us in his white surplice in the little chapel among the oaks and elms which had been his first church, performed the ceremony that gave me the first prize I had really striven for—the greatest any man on earth could have won.
Still, as often as I spoke of my future plans, there was some secret between them: a shadowy suggestion of some mystery in which they both participated. And, but that I knew John Marvel too well, I might have been impatient. But I knew him now for the first time as she had known him long.
On our arrival in the city, after I had given the driver an order where to go, she gave another, and when the carriage drew up, it was not at my hotel, but at the door of the sunny house on the corner where I had first seen Eleanor Leigh come tripping down the steps with her parcels for the poor little crippled child and her violets for the Miss Tippses. Springing out before me, with her face radiant with joy and mystery, she tripped up the steps now just as the door was flung open by a butler who wore a comical expression of mingled pleasure and solemnity, for the butler was Jeams, and then having introduced him to me, she suddenly took the key from the lock, and handing it to me with a bow and a low laugh of delight:
"I make you, sir, livery of seisin."
This, then, was the mystery.
She still lived in the house on the corner—through the aid offered by my namesake and kinsman her father had been enabled to retain it, and had given it to her as a wedding present.
So after long striving by ways that I knew not, and by paths that I had not tried, my fancy was realized.
I now dwell in the house on the corner that I picked so long ago for its sunshine.
It is even sunnier than I thought it. For I have found that sunlight and sweetness are not from without, but from within, and in that home is the radiance I caught that happy morning when I first saw Eleanor Leigh come tripping down the steps, like April, shedding sunshine and violets in her path.