One day—­everything has to be one day, and all in a minute, when it does come, however many days lead up to it—­Doctor Ingleside came in and told us the news.  He had been up to see Grandfather Holabird; grandfather was not quite well.

They told him at home, the doctor said, not to stop anywhere; he knew what they meant by that, but he didn’t care; it was as much his news as anybody’s, and why should he be kept down to pills and plasters?

Leslie was going to marry Doctor John Hautayne.

Well!  It was splendid news, and we had somehow expected it.  And yet—­“only think!” That was all we could say; that is a true thing people do say to each other, in the face of a great, beautiful fact.  Take it in; shut your door upon it; and—­think!  It is something that belongs to heart and soul.

We counted up; it was only seven weeks.

“As if that were the whole of it!” said Doctor Ingleside.  “As if the Lord didn’t know!  As if they hadn’t been living on, to just this meeting-place!  She knows his life, and the sort of it, though she has never been in it with him before; that is, we’ll concede that, for the sake of argument, though I’m not so sure about it; and he has come right here into hers.  They are fair, open, pleasant ways, both of them; and here, from the joining, they can both look back and take in, each the other’s; and beyond they just run into one, you see, as foreordained, and there’s no other way for them to go.”

Nobody knew it but ourselves that next night,—­Thursday.  Doctor Hautayne read beautiful things from the Brownings at Miss Pennington’s that evening; it was his turn to provide; but for us,—­we looked into new depths in Leslie’s serene, clear, woman eyes, and we felt the intenser something in his face and voice, and the wonder was that everybody could not see how quite another thing than any merely written poetry was really “next” that night for Leslie and for John Hautayne.

That was in December; it was the first of March when Grandfather Holabird died.

At about Christmas-time mother had taken a bad cold.  We could not let her get up in the mornings to help before breakfast; the winter work was growing hard; there were two or three fires to manage besides the furnace, which father attended to; and although our “chore-man” came and split up kindlings and filled the wood-boxes, yet we were all pretty well tired out, sometimes, just with keeping warm.  We began to begin to say things to each other which nobody actually finished.  “If mother doesn’t get better,” and “If this cold weather keeps on,” and “Are we going to co-operate ourselves to death, do you think?” from Barbara, at last.

Nobody said, “We shall have to get a girl again.”  Nobody wanted to do that; and everybody had a secret feeling of Aunt Roderick, and her prophecy that we “shouldn’t hold out long.”  But we were crippled and reduced; Ruth had as much as ever she could do, with the short days and her music.