“Is it ungrateful to be happy?” she demanded.  “Would anybody have been in the right who asked us to be unhappy?  Why don’t you call us brave?  Do you imagine it isn’t difficult to have people we love disapproving of us?  But you know yourself, Kate, if we’d waited forty-eight hours, I’d have been dragged off to live with my career.”

She laughed brightly, sinking back in her chair and throwing wide her coat.  Kate looked at her appraisingly, and warmed in the doing of it.

“You don’t look as if you were devoted to a career, she admitted.

“Oh,” sighed Fitzgerald, “I only just barely got her in time!”

“And now what do you propose doing?”

“Why, to-morrow we shall look for a place to live—­for a home.”

“Do you mean a flat?” asked Kate with a flick of satire.

“A flat, or anything.  It doesn’t matter much what.”

“Or where?”

“It will be on the West Side,” said the matter-of-fact Fitzgerald.

“And who’ll keep house for you?  Must you find servants?”

“Why, Kate, we’re dreadfully poor,” cried Marna excitedly, as if poverty were a mere adventure.  “Didn’t you know that?  I shall do my own work.”

“Oh, we’ve both got to work,” added Fitzgerald.

He didn’t say he was sorry Marna had to slave with her little white hands, or that he realized that he was doing a bold—­perhaps an impious—­thing in snatching a woman from her service to art to go into service for him.  Evidently he didn’t think that way.  Neither minded any sacrifice apparently.  The whole of it was, they were together.  Suddenly, they seemed to forget Kate.  They stood gazing at each other as if their sense of possession overwhelmed them.  Kate felt something like angry resentment stir in her.  How dared they, when she was so alone, so weary, so homeless?

“Will you stay to dinner with me?” she asked with something like asperity.

“To dinner?” they murmured in vague chorus.  “No, thanks.”

“But where do you intend to have dinner?”

“We—­we haven’t thought,” confessed Marna.

“Oh, anywhere,” declared Fitzgerald.

Marna rose and her husband buttoned her coat about her.

They smiled at Kate seraphically, and she saw that they wanted to be alone, and that it made little difference to them whether they were sitting in a warm room or walking the windy streets.  She kissed them both, with tears, and said:—­

“God bless you.”

That seemed to be what they wanted.  They longed to be blessed.

“That’s what Aunt Dennison said,” smiled Fitzgerald.

Then Kate realized that now the exotic Marna would be calling the completely domesticated Mrs. Dennison “aunt.”  But Marna looked as if she liked that, too.  It was their hour for liking everything.  As Kate opened the outer door for them, the blast struck through her, but the lovers, laughing, ran down the stairs together.  They were, in their way, outcasts; they were poor; the future might hold bitter disillusion.  But now, borne by the sharp wind, their laughter drifted back like a song.