“Joan may come any day, Nan, dear.  It is so like her to act, once she decides.”

Martin, sitting by the hearth, reflected upon the injustice of Prodigal Sons and Daughters—­but he smiled.

“They don’t deserve it—­but it’s damnably true that they get it,” he mused, irrelevantly.

“Joan’s room is a dream, Nan, come and see it!” called Doris, and Nancy could be heard running and laughing to inspect the Prodigal’s quarters.

“It looks divine!” she ejaculated.  “Push that pink dogwood back a little, Aunt Dorrie—­make it like a frame around the mirror for the dear’s face.”

“How’s that, Nan?”

“Exactly—­right.  Aunt Dorrie?”

“Yes, my dear girl.”

“I have the dearest plan—­I feel that Ken would love it, but I hate to be the one to propose it.”

From his armchair Martin smiled more broadly.

“Perhaps I can do it for you, Nan.”  Doris spoke abstractedly—­she was, apparently, giving more thought to the decorations for the returning wanderer than to the plans of the good child who had remained at her post.

“Well, Aunt Doris, I don’t want to wait until next winter to be married.  Ken writes that he will have Mrs. Tweksbury safely settled in New York by the first of June——­” Emily Tweksbury had fled the influenza and gone to Bermuda only to fall victim to pneumonia.  Kenneth Raymond had been summoned, to what was supposed to be her death-bed, but which she indignantly refused to accept as such.

“When women are as old as I, Ken,” she had whispered as he bent over her, “they consign them to death-beds too easily.  Give me a month, boy, and I’ll go back with you.”

Kenneth had given her a month, then two weeks extra; he was bringing her back now—­a frail old woman, but one in whose heart the determination to live was yet strong.

“But, darling, we’d have to give up the beautiful wedding—­Mrs. Tweksbury could never stand the excitement now, or even this summer.”

Doris’s voice was more suggestive of attention as she now spoke.  Martin waited.

“I know, Aunt Dorrie, but I am sure she would rather have me and Ken married than come to our wedding.  Listen, duckie!  Suppose, after Joan comes, we plan the dearest little service in the Chapel—­I’m sure we could snatch Father Noble as he flits by.  There would be you and Uncle David and Joan, and perhaps Clive could wrench himself away, and Mary and Uncle Jed—­and,” a tender pause, “and—­Ken and me!  We could make the Chapel beautiful with flowers from The Gap—­our flowers—­and then I could help Ken with Mrs. Tweksbury—­for you, Aunt Dorrie, will have Joan.”

Martin blinked his eyes.  He never admitted a mistiness to the extent of wiping them.  He listened for Doris’s next words.

“Childie, it sounds enticing and just like you.  I will talk it over with Uncle David.”

The voices upstairs fell into a silence and Martin got up and paced the room.