Chapter XIV: Doris’s Story

TWO YEARS LATER.

It is just two years since that triple wedding, when six people were made as happy as it is possible to be in this world, Aunt Brier and Mr. Atkins, Aleck and Thea, and Grant and myself, on whom no shadow has fallen since I became Grant’s wife and basked in the fullness of his love, which grows stronger and more tender as the days go on. He is now studying hard in a law office in town, determined to fit himself for something useful, and if possible atone for the selfish, useless life he led before we were married. We spent a year abroad, going everywhere with Aleck and Thea, and staying a few weeks in Mr. Atkins’s elegant villa near Alexandria, where everything is done in the most luxurious and Oriental manner, and Aunt Brier was a very queen among her subjects. When the year of travel was ended we came back to Morton Park, where a royal welcome awaited us, and where Aunt Kizzy took me in her arms and cried over me a little and then led me to my room, or rather rooms, one of which was the Glory Hole, which had been fitted up as a boudoir, or dressing-room, while the large, airy chamber adjacent, where Thea used to sleep, had also been thoroughly repaired and refurnished, and was given to us in place of Grant’s old room.

And here this Christmas morning I am finishing my journal, in which I have recorded so much of my life,—more, in fact, than I care to read. I wish I had left out a good deal about Aunt Kizzy. She is greatly changed from the grim woman who held me at arm’s length when I first came from school, and of whom I stood in fear. We have talked that all over, and made it up, and every day she gives me some new proof of her affection. But the greatest transformation in her came some weeks ago, with the advent of a little boy, who is sleeping in his crib, with a yellow-turbaned negress keeping watch over him. Aunt Kizzy calls herself his grandmother, and tends him more, if possible, than the nurse. Grant laments that it is not a girl, so as to bear some one or two of the queer names of its ancestors. But I am glad it is a boy, and next Sunday it will be christened Gerold Douglas, for my father and grandfather, and Aleck and Thea will stand for it. They have bought a beautiful place a little out of town and have settled down into a regular Darby and Joan, wholly satisfied with each Other and lacking nothing to make them perfectly happy. Aunt Brier and Mr. Atkins are also here, staying in the house until spring, when they will build on a part of the Morton estate which Mr. Atkins has bought of Grant. Oriental life did not suit Aunt Brier, and, as her slightest wish is sacred to her husband, he has brought her to her old home, where, when Aleck and Thea are with us, we make a very merry party, talking of all we have seen in Europe, and sometimes of the Hepburn line, which Aleck says I straightened,—always insisting, however, that it did not need straightening, and that the obnoxious clause in the lease would never have stood the test of the law. Whether it would or not, I do not know, as we have never inquired.

MILDRED’S AMBITION.