“I do.  For myself I am entirely sure.  As to Katherine—­Suppose she tells you what she thinks.”

I turned toward her.  “Do you, Miss Katherine?  It takes—­I guess it takes a lot of love to stand marriage.  Do you think you have enough?”

In the moonlight her face changed like her opal ring when the cream becomes pink and the pink red.

“I think there is,” she said.  Then:  “Oh, Mary Cary, why are you such a strange, strange child?” And she threw her arms around me and kissed me twenty times.

After a while, after we’d talked and talked, and they’d told me things and I’d told them things, I said I’d consent.

“But if the love ever gives out, I’m not going to stay with you,” I said.  “I’m never going to be fashionable and not care for love.  A home without it is hell.”

“Mercy, Mary!” Uncle Parke jumped.  “Don’t use such strong language.  It isn’t nice.”

“But it’s true.  I read it in a book, and I’ve watched the Rices.  When there’s love enough you can stand anything.  When there isn’t, you can stand nothing.  Living together every day you find out a lot you didn’t know, and love can’t keep still.  It’s got to grow or die.”

Then I jumped up.  “I always could talk a lot about things I didn’t understand,” I said.  “But I consent.”  And I flew down the road and left them.

I’ve written it out on a piece of paper, about their being engaged, and looked at it by night and by day since they told me about it.  I’ve said it low, and I’ve said it loud, but I can’t realize it, and the little sense the Lord gave me He has taken away.

They say I did it.  Say I’m responsible for every bit of it, and that I will have to look after them all the rest of their lives to see that I didn’t make a mistake in writing that letter.  And that I’m to go to Europe with them on their wedding tour and live with them always and always.  And—­oh!—­I believe my heart is going to burst with miserable happiness and happy miserableness, and my head feels like it’s in a bag.

Dr. Parke Alden and Miss Katherine Trent are the two nicest people on earth, and the two I love best.  But I don’t think they know all the time what they are doing and saying.  They are that in love they don’t see but one side—­the happy side—­and they think I am going to leave this place with a skip and a jump and run along by them, third person, single number, and not know I’m in the way.

They won’t even listen when I tell them I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I know what I want to do!  Everything in me gets into shivering trembleness when I think I could go to Europe with them on their wedding trip.  Think of it!  Mary Cary could go to E-U-R-O-P-E!

They’ve invited me and say I’m to go, because I’m never to leave them any more, and they want me.  But it isn’t so.  Mary tries to believe it’s so, but Martha knows it isn’t.  They think they think they want me, but they don’t; nobody wants an outsider on a wedding tour, and I’m not going.  I can’t help it.  Come on, tears!  Even angels sometimes cry aloud; and, not being a step-relation to one, I’m going to let Mary cry if she wants to.  Sometimes Martha is real hard on Mary.