“Still with the pea money?” she gurgled, her gayety coming back. “No, sir; I’ve some money, too. Not much, but a little to take the place of the wedding presents I’ve no relatives to give me. I want to help furnish Twin Fires.” She laid her fingers on my protesting lips. “I shall, anyway,” she added. “We are two lone orphans, you and I, but we have each other, and all that is mine is yours, all–all–all!”
Suddenly she threw her arms about my neck, and I was silent in the mystery of her passion.
Chapter XVII
I DO NOT RETURN ALONE
Many people, I presume, long to fly from New York during a late June and early July hot spell. But nobody who does not possess a new place in the country, still unfurnished, with a garden crying for his attention and a brook wandering amid the pines, can possibly realize how the dust and heat of town affected me in the next ten days. It affected me the more because I saw how pale Stella was, how tired when the evenings came. With her woman’s conscientiousness, she was struggling to do two weeks’ work in one before leaving the dictionary. She even toiled several evenings, denying herself to me, while I wandered disconsolate along Broadway, or worked over my manuscripts at the club, surrounded by siphons of soda. At the luncheon hour and between five and six we shopped madly, getting a stair carpet, dining-room chairs (a present from her to herself and me, as she put it–fine Chippendale reproductions), a few rugs–as many as we could afford–and other necessary furnishings, including stuff for curtains. For the south room the curtains were gay Japanese silk from an Oriental store, to balance the Hiroshiges, and while we were buying them she slipped away from me and presently returned, the proud possessor of two small ivory elephants.
“Look, somebody has sent us another present!” she laughed. “Folks are so good to us! These are to stand on the twin mantels, under the prints.”
“From whom are they?” I asked.
“Your best friend and my worst enemy,” she answered.
For three days after she left the office of the dictionary I saw little of her. “There are some things you can’t buy for me–or with me,” she smiled. Then we went down together to the City Hall for our license, sneaking in after hours, thanks to the kindly offices of a classmate of mine, the city editor of a newspaper. The clerk beamed upon us like a municipal Cupid.
That last evening she left me, to pack her trunks, and I went back to the club, and found there a letter from the magazine where I had submitted my story. It was a letter of acceptance! Misfortunes are not the only things which never come singly. I danced for joy. If the stores had been open I should have rushed out then and there and bought the mahogany secretary we had seen a few days before and wistfully passed by. Fortunately, they were not open.