“What! Laura! Married? My darling girl!”
“Yes,” answered Laura calmly. “In July—or maybe sooner.”
“Why, I thought you had rejected Mr. Corthell. I thought that’s why he went away.”
“Went away? He never went away. I mean it’s not Mr. Corthell. It’s Mr. Jadwin.”
“Thank God!” declared Mrs. Cressler fervently, and with the words kissed Laura on both cheeks. “My dear, dear child, you can’t tell how glad I am. From the very first I’ve said you were made for one another. And I thought all the time that you’d told him you wouldn’t have him.”
“I did,” said Laura. Her manner was quiet. She seemed a little grave. “I told him I did not love him. Only last week I told him so.”
“Well, then, why did you promise?”
“My goodness!” exclaimed Laura, with a show of animation. “You don’t realize what it’s been. Do you suppose you can say ‘no’ to that man?”
“Of course not, of course not,” declared Mrs. Cressler joyfully. “That’s ‘J.’ all over. I might have known he’d have you if he set out to do it.”
“Morning, noon, and night,” Laura continued. “He seemed willing to wait as long as I wasn’t definite; but one day I wrote to him and gave him a square ‘No,’ so as he couldn’t mistake, and just as soon as I’d said that he—he—began. I didn’t have any peace until I’d promised him, and the moment I had promised he had a ring on my finger. He’d had it ready in his pocket for weeks it seems. No,” she explained, as Mrs. Cressler laid her fingers upon her left hand, “That I would not have—yet.”
“Oh, it was like ‘J.’ to be persistent,” repeated Mrs. Cressler.
“Persistent!” murmured Laura. “He simply wouldn’t talk of anything else. It was making him sick, he said. And he did have a fever—often. But he would come out to see me just the same. One night, when it was pouring rain—Well, I’ll tell you. He had been to dinner with us, and afterwards, in the drawing-room, I told him ‘no’ for the hundredth time just as plainly as I could, and he went away early—it wasn’t eight. I thought that now at last he had given up. But he was back again before ten the same evening. He said he had come back to return a copy of a book I had loaned him—Jane Eyre it was. Raining! I never saw it rain as it did that night. He was drenched, and even at dinner he had had a low fever. And then I was sorry for him. I told him he could come to see me again. I didn’t propose to have him come down with pneumonia, or typhoid, or something. And so it all began over again.”
“But you loved him, Laura?” demanded Mrs. Cressler. “You love him now?”
Laura was silent. Then at length:
“I don’t know,” she answered.
“Why, of course you love him, Laura,” insisted Mrs. Cressler. “You wouldn’t have promised him if you hadn’t. Of course you love him, don’t you?”
“Yes, I—I suppose I must love him, or—as you say—I wouldn’t have promised to marry him. He does everything, every little thing I say. He just seems to think of nothing else but to please me from morning until night. And when I finally said I would marry him, why, Mrs. Cressler, he choked all up, and the tears ran down his face, and all he could say was, ‘May God bless you! May God bless you!’ over and over again, and his hand shook so that—Oh, well,” she broke off abruptly. Then added, “Somehow it makes tears come to my eyes to think of it.”
“But, Laura,” urged Mrs. Cressler, “you love Curtis, don’t you? You—you’re such a strange girl sometimes. Dear child, talk to me as though I were your mother. There’s no one in the world loves you more than I do. You love Curtis, don’t you?”
Laura hesitated a long moment.
“Yes,” she said, slowly at length. “I think I love him very much—sometimes. And then sometimes I think I don’t. I can’t tell. There are days when I’m sure of it, and there are others when I wonder if I want to be married, after all. I thought when love came it was to be—oh, uplifting, something glorious like Juliet’s love or Marguerite’s. Something that would—” Suddenly she struck her hand to her breast, her fingers shut tight, closing to a fist. “Oh, something that would shake me all to pieces. I thought that was the only kind of love there was.”
“Oh, that’s what you read about in trashy novels,” Mrs. Cressler assured her, “or the kind you see at the matinees. I wouldn’t let that bother me, Laura. There’s no doubt that ‘J.’ loves you.”
Laura brightened a little. “Oh, no,” she answered, “there’s no doubt about that. It’s splendid, that part of it. He seems to think there’s nothing in the world too good for me. Just imagine, only yesterday I was saying something about my gloves, I really forget what—something about how hard it was for me to get the kind of gloves I liked. Would you believe it, he got me to give him my measure, and when I saw him in the evening he told me he had cabled to Brussels to some famous glovemaker and had ordered I don’t know how many pairs.”
“Just like him, just like him!” cried Mrs. Cressler. “I know you will be happy, Laura, dear. You can’t help but be with a man who loves you as ‘J.’ does.”
“I think I shall be happy,” answered Laura, suddenly grave. “Oh, Mrs. Cressler, I want to be. I hope that I won’t come to myself some day, after it is too late, and find that it was all a mistake.” Her voice shook a little. “You don’t know how nervous I am these days.
