She thought men in love were very queer and quite incomprehensible.  Because he varied in other ways, too.  He was boyish and gay sometimes, and again silent and almost brooding.  She thought at those times that perhaps he was tired, what with David’s work and his own, and sometimes she wondered if he were still worrying about that silly story.  But once or twice, after he had gone, she went upstairs and looked carefully into her mirror.  Perhaps she had not looked her best that day.  Girl-like, she set great value on looks in love.  She wanted frightfully to be beautiful to him.  She wished she could look like Beverly Carlysle, for instance.

Two days before David and Lucy’s departure he had brought her her engagement ring, a square-cut diamond set in platinum.  He kissed it first and then her finger, and slipped it into place.  It became a rite, done as he did it, and she had a sense of something done that could never be undone.  When she looked up at him he was very pale.

“Forsaking all others, so long as we both shall live,” he said, unsteadily.

“So long as we both shall live,” she repeated.

However she had to take it off later, for Mrs. Wheeler, it developed, had very pronounced ideas of engagement rings.  They were put on the day the notices were sent to the newspapers, and not before.  So Elizabeth wore her ring around her neck on a white ribbon, inside her camisole, until such time as her father would consent to announce that he was about to lose her.

Thus Elizabeth found her engagement full of unexpected turns and twists, and nothing precisely as she had expected.  But she accepted things as they came, being of the type around which the dramas of life are enacted, while remaining totally undramatic herself.  She lived her quiet days, worried about Jim on occasion, hemmed table napkins for her linen chest, and slept at night with her ring on her finger and a sense of being wrapped in protecting love that was no longer limited to the white Wheeler house, but now extended two blocks away and around the corner to a shabby old brick building in a more or less shabby yard.

They were very gay in the old brick house that night before the departure, very noisy over the fish and David’s broiled lamb chop.  Dick demanded a bottle of Lucy’s home-made wine, and even David got a little of it.  They toasted the seashore, and the departed nurse, and David quoted Robert Burns at some length and in a horrible Scotch accent.  Then Dick had a trick by which one read the date on one of three pennies while he was not looking, and he could tell without failing which one it was.  It was most mysterious.  And after dinner Dick took her into his laboratory, and while she squinted one eye and looked into the finder of his microscope he kissed the white nape of her neck.

When they left the laboratory there were patients in the waiting-room, but he held her in his arms in the office for a moment or two, very quietly, and because the door was thin they made a sort of game of it, and pretended she was a patient.