Rachael’s delightful laugh rang out spontaneously from utter relief of heart.

“Oh, Greg, you’re delicious!  Tell me about old Lady Frothingham, is she difficult, too?  And how’s pretty Magsie Clay?”

“Now, if we’re married to-morrow,” the doctor Went on, too much absorbed in his topic to be lightly distracted.  “But do you hear me, Ma’am?  How does it sound?”

“It sounds delicious!  Go on!”

“If we’re married to-morrow, I say—­it could be to-day just as well, but I suppose you girls have to buy clothes, and have your hands manicured, and so on—­”

“You know we do, to say nothing of lying awake all night talking about our beaux!”

“Well”—­he conceded it somewhat reluctantly—­“then, to-morrow, some time before I go with Valentine to call for you, I’ll go down to see my mother.  She’ll kiss me, and sigh, and feel martyred.  In a month or two she’ll call on me at the office.  ’Why don’t you and your wife come to see me, James?’ ’Would you like us to, Mother?  We fancied you were angry at us.’  ’I am sorry, my son, of course, but I have never been angry.  Will you come to-morrow night?’ And when we go, my dear, you’d never dream that there was anything amiss, I assure you!”

“I’ll make her love me!” said Rachael, smiling tenderly.

“Perhaps some day you’ll have a very powerful argument,” he said with a significant glance that brought the quick blood to her face.  “Mother couldn’t resist that!”

She did not answer.  It was a part of this new freshness and purity of aspect that she could not answer.

“You asked about Margaret Clay,” the doctor remembered presently.  “She was the same old sixpence, only growing up now; she owns to nineteen—­isn’t she more than that?  She always did romance and yarn so much about herself that you can’t believe anything.”

“She’s about twenty-one, perhaps no more than twenty,” Rachael said, after some thought.  “Did they say anything about Parker and Leila?”

“No, but the old lady can’t do much harm there.  She’ll not last another six months.  She may leave Margaret a slice, but it won’t be much of a slice, for Parker could fight if it was.  Leila’s pretty safe.  We’ll have to go to that wedding, by the way!”

“Oh, Greg, the fun of going places together!” She was her happiest self again.  His mother and Alice Valentine and everything else but their great joy was forgotten as they lingered over their luncheon and planned for their wedding day.

If they could only have been alone together, always, thought the new-made wife, when two perfect weeks on the powerful motor boat were over, and all the society editors were busily announcing that Doctor and Mrs. James Warren Gregory were furnishing their luxurious apartment in the Rotterdam, where they would spend the winter.  They were so happy together; there was never enough time to talk and to be silent, never enough of their little luncheons all by themselves, their theatre trips, their afternoon drives through the sweet, clear early winter sunshine on the Park.