“No,” said Hilma, at length. “I—I—I can say it for myself. I—” All at once she turned to him and put her arms around his neck. “Oh, do you love me?” she cried. “Is it really true? Do you mean every word of it? And you are sorry and you will be good to me if I will be your wife? You will be my dear, dear husband?”
The tears sprang to Annixter’s eyes. He took her in his arms and held her there for a moment. Never in his life had he felt so unworthy, so undeserving of this clean, pure girl who forgave him and trusted his spoken word and believed him to be the good man he could only wish to be. She was so far above him, so exalted, so noble that he should have bowed his forehead to her feet, and instead, she took him in her arms, believing him to be good, to be her equal. He could think of no words to say. The tears overflowed his eyes and ran down upon his cheeks. She drew away from him and held him a second at arm’s length, looking at him, and he saw that she, too, had been crying.
“I think,” he said, “we are a couple of softies.”
“No, no,” she insisted. “I want to cry and want you to cry, too. Oh, dear, I haven’t a handkerchief.”
“Here, take mine.”
They wiped each other’s eyes like two children and for a long time sat in the deserted little Japanese pleasure house, their arms about each other, talking, talking, talking.
On the following Saturday they were married in an uptown Presbyterian church, and spent the week of their honeymoon at a small, family hotel on Sutter Street. As a matter of course, they saw the sights of the city together. They made the inevitable bridal trip to the Cliff House and spent an afternoon in the gruesome and made-to-order beauties of Sutro’s Gardens; they went through Chinatown, the Palace Hotel, the park museum—where Hilma resolutely refused to believe in the Egyptian mummy—and they drove out in a hired hack to the Presidio and the Golden Gate.
On the sixth day of their excursions, Hilma abruptly declared they had had enough of “playing out,” and must be serious and get to work.
This work was nothing less than the buying of the furniture and appointments for the rejuvenated ranch house at Quien Sabe, where they were to live. Annixter had telegraphed to his overseer to have the building repainted, replastered, and reshingled and to empty the rooms of everything but the telephone and safe. He also sent instructions to have the dimensions of each room noted down and the result forwarded to him. It was the arrival of these memoranda that had roused Hilma to action.
Then ensued a most delicious week. Armed with formidable lists, written by Annixter on hotel envelopes, they two descended upon the department stores of the city, the carpet stores, the furniture stores. Right and left they bought and bargained, sending each consignment as soon as purchased to Quien Sabe. Nearly an entire car load of carpets, curtains, kitchen furniture, pictures, fixtures, lamps, straw matting, chairs, and the like were sent down to the ranch, Annixter making a point that their new home should be entirely equipped by San Francisco dealers.
The furnishings of the bedroom and sitting-room were left to the very last. For the former, Hilma bought a “set” of pure white enamel, three chairs, a washstand and bureau, a marvellous bargain of thirty dollars, discovered by wonderful accident at a “Friday Sale.” The bed was a piece by itself, bought elsewhere, but none the less a wonder. It was of brass, very brave and gay, and actually boasted a canopy! They bought it complete, just as it stood in the window of the department store and Hilma was in an ecstasy over its crisp, clean, muslin curtains, spread, and shams. Never was there such a bed, the luxury of a princess, such a bed as she had dreamed about her whole life.
Next the appointments of the sitting-room occupied her—since Annixter, himself, bewildered by this astonishing display, unable to offer a single suggestion himself, merely approved of all she bought. In the sitting-room was to be a beautiful blue and white paper, cool straw matting, set off with white wool rugs, a stand of flowers in the window, a globe of goldfish, rocking chairs, a sewing machine, and a great, round centre table of yellow oak whereon should stand a lamp covered with a deep shade of crinkly red tissue paper. On the walls were to hang several pictures—lovely affairs, photographs from life, all properly tinted—of choir boys in robes, with beautiful eyes; pensive young girls in pink gowns, with flowing yellow hair, drooping over golden harps; a coloured reproduction of Rouget de Lisle, Singing the Marseillaise, and two “pieces” of wood carving, representing a quail and a wild duck, hung by one leg in the midst of game bags and powder horns—quite masterpieces, both.
At last everything had been bought, all arrangements made, Hilma’s trunks packed with her new dresses, and the tickets to Bonneville bought.
“We’ll go by the Overland, by Jingo,” declared Annixter across the table to his wife, at their last meal in the hotel where they had been stopping; “no way trains or locals for us, hey?”
“But we reach Bonneville at such an hour,” protested Hilma. “Five in the morning!”
“Never mind,” he declared, “we’ll go home in Pullman’s, Hilma. I’m not going to have any of those slobs in Bonneville say I didn’t know how to do the thing in style, and we’ll have Vacca meet us with the team. No, sir, it is Pullman’s or nothing. When it comes to buying furniture, I don’t shine, perhaps, but I know what’s due my wife.”
He was obdurate, and late one afternoon the couple boarded the Transcontinental (the
