“Then,” said Grace, “if I can get that release, and will pay you as much as you receive here, and all your expenses out and back, will you go?”

“Indeed, I will,” she answered, “and will be grateful to you all my life.”

The arrangement was easily made, and the further arrangement that Sedgwick and his bride should go to Ohio, visit Sedgwick’s family for three or four days; then should join the Forbeses and Mrs. Hazleton at a certain hotel in New York, and all would embark on the steamer that would sail on the next week Saturday—­ten days from that day.

Then Sedgwick and Grace started for the Miami Valley.

What a welcome was there!  The old house had been repaired, modernized, refurnished and repainted.  A new house had been built on the other farm.  It was in the first days of February.  That year there was good sleighing, and the whole town seemed to turn out to celebrate the occasion of Jim Sedgwick’s bringing home his bride.  Four days passed in a whirl of pleasure.  The first morning after their arrival, Sedgwick asked his brother for his trotting team, his new cutter, and the bells, to give Grace her first sleigh-ride.  The steppers were of the 2:30 class, the roads good, and the fair English girl-wife was in ecstacies.  They drove past the Jasper farm on the hill, and Sedgwick told Grace that it was his dream for years to accumulate $30,000 to release the mortgage from his father’s farm and to buy the Jasper farm.

“Then what would I have done?” asked Grace.

“Married some English banker, or may be some ‘My Lord Fitzdoodle,’ probably,” said Sedgwick.

“But, then, suppose a year later I had seen you, what would become of me?” she said.

“We should have been very formal and polite, and then have gone our several ways,” said Sedgwick.

“Yes, because you are a man of principle, and I hope my pride of womanhood would have sustained me, but my heart would have broken, for with me it was a mad passion which absorbed my life before I had been in your presence half an hour,” said Grace; and then added:  “I do not any more wonder at the crimes which come of mismated marriages.”

Then Sedgwick told her how, when he left her side the first time, he took that ride and asked cabbie how much they would charge at Newgate to hang him.

And they both laughed, but there were tears in the eyes of Grace even while she smiled.  But she rallied in a moment and said: 

“Why not buy the place still?  Except to leave my mother, I would be on that farm with you as happy a wife as ever lived.  I would rather live upon that hill than in our great modern Babel, London.”

Just then the cutter went in and out of a “Thank-ee-mom”—­a hollow between two snowdrifts—­and Sedgwick bent and kissed his wife.

“Thanks,” said Grace.

“That was a kiss on principle.  That was a pure duty,” said Sedgwick.  Then he explained how venerable was the custom, and elaborated upon the respect due it because of its age and its usefulness to bashful lovers, because a youth must kiss the girl who goes sleighing with him whenever he comes to a “Thank-ee-mom” among the drifts.