“I think if you will excuse me,” she said, “I’ll go up and prepare for luncheon.”

Mary gazed conscience-stricken from her to Wallace who was blushing like a boy caught stealing apples.  “I’m sorry,” she gasped, but not quickly enough for the apology to overtake her aunt.  “It’s terrible of me to say things like that and I do, every now and then.  Can you bear with me until I’ve had time to quiet down?  It’s all so new, to be happy like this, I’m a little—­wild with it.”

In his nice neutral unexaggerated way he told her that her happiness could never be anything but a joy to him; and after that, when they were seated side by side upon the cane davenport he asked about her plans; when they were going to be married, where they meant to live, and so on.

“Why, we’ll be married, I suppose,” she said, “at the end of the customary six weeks’ engagement.  There isn’t a thing to wait for, really.”

“I’m glad of that,” he remarked.

Anybody but Mary would have taken that at its face value; he was glad that they would have to wait no longer.  But he flinched as she glanced round toward him and at that she laughed and patted his hand reassuringly.

“We’re doing everything correctly,” she told him; “beginning with father’s announcement of the engagement in the papers, Tuesday.  We remain on exhibition during the conventional six weeks and then we’re married at noon over in the Fourth Church.  Impeccable!  That’s going to be our middle name.”

Mary used so very little slang that she was able to produce quite extraordinary effects with it when she did.

“I’m glad,” Wallace said, a little ruffled by the start she had given him, “that you have not been persuaded to do anything—­differently.”

“Who do you suppose it was,” she asked, “who insisted, in an adamantine manner, that it be done like that?  It wasn’t me and it wasn’t Aunt Lucile.  It was Anthony March.”  She added, after a reflective silence, “He was right about it, of course, because when that’s over it’s done with.  And then—­what he hasn’t thought of, and I wouldn’t have, most likely until it was too late—­he’ll have a friendlier audience next Tuesday night than if he’d given me my way and made a trip to the City Hall with me last Monday.  I wanted to burn my bridges, you see;—­and he laughed at me.  I haven’t told that to any one but you.—­All the same, if he thinks, from that, that he can go on accumulating—­millstones ...”

“Tell me where you are planning to live,” Wallace said, getting back as he was always glad to do, to firm ground again.  “Not too far away, I hope, for us to go on seeing a lot of you.”

“Oh, it’s very sad about that,” she told him.  “I was hoping to live with him in his secret lair over the Italian grocery.  No, but it was really delightful.  One big room, bigger than this, with dormers and dusty beams and an outside stair.  He’s had it for years.  It’s not half a mile from here—­and Paula could never find out where it was!  But, unexpectedly, he’s being turned out.  I could have wept when he told me.”