Not moving his sympathetic eyes from her Checking Page back In, Please Wait ... to town again, and his own pleasure in their visit was talking of Nancy; how wise, how sweet, how infinitely desirable she was.  Dorothy had wanted Cousin Albert to come to her for Thanksgiving.  No, a thousand thanks—­but Miss Barrett was so much alone now.  He must be near her.  Dorothy kept her thoughts on the subject to herself, but he so far impressed his mother that her own hopes came to be his, she dreaded the thought of what might happen to her boy if that southern girl did not chance to care for him.

But the southern girl cared.  She locked the lace-clad arms about his neck, on this memorable Christmas night and laid her cheek against his.  “Are you sure you want me, Bert?” she whispered.

They had not much altered their positions when Mrs. Venables came back half an hour later, and a general time of kissing, crying and laughing began.

Chapter Three

It was a happy time, untroubled by the thought of money that was soon to be so important.  Bert’s various aunts and cousins sent him checks, and Nancy’s stepmother sent her all her own mother’s linen and silver, and odd pieces of mahogany on which the freight charges were frightful, and laces and an oil portrait or two.  The trousseau was helped from all sides, every week had its miracle; and the hats, and the embroidered whiteness, and the smart street suit and the adorable kitchen ginghams accumulated as if by magic.  Bert’s mother sent delightfully monogrammed bed and table-linen, almost weekly.  Nancy said it was preposterous for poor people to start in with such priceless possessions!

Among the happy necessities of the time was the finding of a proper apartment.  Nancy and Bert spent delightful Saturdays and Sundays wandering in quest of it; beginning half-seriously in February, when it seemed far too early to consider this detail, and continuing with augmented earnestness through the three succeeding months.  Eventually they got both tired and discouraged, and felt dashed in the very opening of their new life, but finally the place was found, and they loved it instantly, and leased it without delay.  It was in a new apartment house, in East Eleventh Street, four shiny and tiny rooms, on a fourth floor.  Everything was almost too compact and convenient, Nancy thought; the ice box, gas stove, dumb-waiter, hanging light over the dining table, clothes line, and garbage chute, were already in place.  It left an ambitious housekeeper small margin for original arrangement, but of course it did save money and time.  The building was of pretty cream brick, clean and fresh, the street wide, and lined with dignified old brownstone houses, and the location perfect.  She smothered a dream of wide old-fashioned rooms, quaintly furnished in chintzes and white paint.  They had found no such enchanting places, except at exorbitant