"Won't it do to add just a paragraph, saying that our fairy G.o.dmamma found and gave you the journal, and that then we 'lived happily ever after'?"

"No, Donald," she begged. "I want the whole story, to match the rest."

"Five years ago I knew the saddest and most dejected of fellows, whose misery was so great that he wailed it out on paper. But now I know only the happiest of mortals, and he cannot write in the lugubrious tone of yore--unless a lady of his acquaintance will banish him from her presence or do something else equally joy-destroying."

"Are you trying to bribe me into giving you a rest from my presence for a time?"

"Undoubtedly," I a.s.sented. "It's a fearful strain to live up to you, and it is beginning to tell on me."

"If I didn't know you were teasing, I should really be hurt. But I should like to ask you one thing."

"And that is?"

"In your journal--well--of course I know that you were--that I am not--that your love made you think me what I never was in the least, Donald," she faltered, "but still, perhaps--Do you remember what Mr.

Blodgett said about his not giving Mrs. Blodgett for ten of the women he--? I hope you like my reality as much as your ideal."

"Haven't you changed your idea of me, Maizie?"

"Oh yes."

"And therefore you don't love me as much?"

"But that's different, Donald," she observed seriously.

"How?"

"Why, you treated me so strangely that, inevitably, I didn't know what you were like; and though you interested me very much, and though your journal brought back my old love for you, still, what I did was more in pity and admiration and reparation than--and so I could fall deeper in love. While you, being so much in love already, and with such a totally different woman"--

"Only went from bad to worse," I groaned. "Yes, I own up. My sin is one of the lowest man can commit. I have fallen in love with a married woman. And the strange thing about it is that you are not jealous of her! Indeed, I really believe that you are magnanimous enough to love her too, though it's natural you should not like her as much as you do some others. But next August I'll leave her and go to India to study for my new book."

"The married woman will go too," she predicted calmly.

"I shouldn't dare risk her among those hill tribes."

"And she won't risk you where it isn't safe for her to go."

"I was only thinking of your lovely complexion," I explained.

"Old mahogany is very fashionable," she laughed.

"Can nothing make you stay at home?" I asked beseechingly.

"I wonder if there ever was a husband who did not love to tease his wife?"

"The divorce courts have records of many such unloving wretches."

"What I want," she told me, returning to her wish, "is to have you take it up just where you left off. Tell about your pneumonia, and how Mrs.

Blodgett found your journal, but didn't dare give it to me till the doctor was certain you would recover; and then tell of my sending you flowers and jellies and everything I could think of, by her, to help you get well. How"--

"I should have eaten twice as much and recovered much more quickly if she had only let me know from whom they really came," I interjected in an aggrieved tone.

"And tell how I wouldn't listen to that scoundrel till you should have a chance to justify yourself; how, the moment I had read your diary, I wrote and rejected him, and would not see him when he called; how he would not accept his dismissal, but followed me to the country; tell how dreadfully in the way he was that evening, till Mrs. Blodgett and Agnes and I trapped him into a game of whist"--

"You Machiavellis!"

"Tell all about my confession, and how we all spoiled you for those months at My Fancy. Oh, weren't they lovely, Donald?"

"I thought so then."

"But not now?"

"A gooseberry is good till you taste a strawberry. There was a good deal too much gooseberry, as I remember."

"Then tell how the papers and people chattered about your a.s.suming your true name; and how they gabbled when we were married,--and how, on our wedding day, we endowed the hospital ward"--

"Haven't you made a slip in the p.r.o.noun?"

"I'll box your ears if you even suggest it again; half of the money was what you earned--endowed the hospital ward in memory of _our_ dear father, and how happy we've been since."

"You've made a mistake in the last p.r.o.noun, I'm certain."

"You will write it to please me, Donald?"

"Oh, Maizie, I can't. It's all too dear to me."

"Please, Don, try?"

"But"--

She interrupted my protest. "Donald," she said, the tenderness in her face and voice softening her words, "before knowing that I loved you, you insisted that debt must be paid. Won't you pay me now, dear?"

"I don't merely owe you money, Maizie!" I cried. "I owe you everything, and I'm a brute to the most generous of women. Give me the book, dear heart."

"You'll make it nice, like the rest, won't you?" she begged.

"I'll try." And then I laughingly added, "Maizie, you still have the technical part of story-telling to learn."

"How?"

"I can't write all you wish and make it symmetrical. In the first place, we don't want to spend so much time on Whitely as to give him a fict.i.tious value; and next, to be artistic, we must end with our good-night that evening."

"Well, that will do, if you'll only tell it nicely."

And that, my dears, is why I write again of those old days, so distant now in time and mood. What is told here is shared with you only to please my love, and I ask of you that it shall be a confidence. And of Another I beg that each of you in time may find a love as strong as that told here; that each may be as true and n.o.ble as your mother, and as happy as your father.

Good-night, my children. Good-night, my love. May G.o.d be as good to you as he has been to me.