I could hardly believe my eyes and ears. In the dim candlelight, in the hall, McGinity's first act was to wrap her tenderly about with his warm young arms, and press her lips to his.
Then Pat spoke, softly and sweetly. "When did you first love me, Bob?"
A question well put, I thought. Something every woman wants to know.
"From the first moment I saw you," McGinity breathed passionately. "But I made myself so wretchedly unhappy," he went on, "believing that I'd no right to love you. But, somehow, seeing you at the typewriter like that, in the stuffy and cluttered news-room, it came to me that I had been most selfish and wrong. I realized that you had made your interests common with mine. It was a challenge and a declaration. I feel now that I've the right to love you, and to ask you to be my wife...."
And the next thing that I knew was that I was dancing lightly up and down the upper hall, in the exaltation and excitement of this wonderful thing that had happened to Pat, to the surprise and perhaps disapproval of the proud and stiff Royces, male and female, who looked down from its walls. While Henry, smiles wreathing his face when I told him, murmured: "Don't be such a colossal ass, Livingston!"
In a surprisingly short time, Pat and McGinity were married. A quiet, informal wedding in our Washington Square house, in December, but rather noisily emblazoned by the newspapers, which dearly love a romance, especially when it's coupled with high adventure. A fortnight's honeymoon in Bermuda, and McGinity returned with his bride, to find a considerable boost in salary, and the offer of an important sub-editorship, awaiting him at the Daily Recorder office.
Pat does all her writing at home now, still under the pen name of Nora Nolan, with rather amazing success, while McGinity continues at his favorite newspaper employment.
This brings me up to date about things.
One day, late in June, as I was returning from an inspection of Henry's garden of herbs, at the rear of the castle, Mamie Sparks, our colored laundress, called to me from the door of the servants' wing. Staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed, she pointed at the peaked observatory tower, with its sliding glass roof, which now houses the happily married couple—where they can gaze up at the moon and stars, while their hearts chant paeans of praise and thanks to their particularly beloved and lucky star, Mars.
"Marse Livingston! Look!" Mamie exclaimed.