Joan and Archibald were married two weeks later, very quietly, before only her family, resisting all the Major's importunities to make an occasion of it. Nor would the girl accept a trousseau.

"If I need any more clothes than I've got already, Archie will buy them for me. Won't you, old boy?" she said, slipping her hand into his.

Archie, with the happy consciousness of a rapidly growing business and several years' savings in a Building Association replied proudly that he would.

One comment she had missed on her engagement; Stefan Nikolai's. She had written to him at once (her first letter since his post-card advising a preliminary course in matrimony), saying in effect, "Now I hope you're satisfied!" But as no reply came, she reached the correct conclusion that he was on the wing again, with her letter following him from address to address, unread.

Ten minutes after the little ceremony that left her no longer Joan Darcy, a cablegram was brought to her from London.

"Wait. Coming. Nikolai."

To which she replied with reckless extravagance:

"Too late. Sorry. Come anyway...."

Alone at last with her husband in a carriage (to which the negro yard-boy, feeling with the Major that something was lacking to the occasion, had generously attached one of his own shoes), Joan asked rather listlessly where he meant to take her. She had a conviction that it would be to Atlantic City, or to Niagara Falls.

For Archie was everything that was most correct in the way of bridegrooms. His bulldog toes, his padded blue serge, his near-Panama hat, his very socks, were so palpably bought for the occasion that Joan felt that to match him she ought to be wearing dove-gray and a shrinking manner.

But she did not feel particularly shrinking; merely relieved that the die was cast, and tired enough to be glad of the arm that stole tentatively around her.

"What train are we catching, dear?" she asked.

"No train at all.—Oh, Joan," he said tremulously, "I hope you won't mind! It's just for to-night—just a foolish idea of mine."

"What is?"

"Wait and see!"

She waited rather apprehensively. She was a little nervous about surprises, since her father's recent effort in that line.

But the carriage was traversing a street she knew well, and it presently stopped in front of the house where Ellen lived. There was still a tinge of afterglow reflected in its many-paned windows, and among the young feathery leafage of the old sycamore sparrows were preparing to go to bed. Two or three of the denizens of the lower floors were taking a breath of air on the doorstep. They stared at the carriage with interest.

"None of 'em know about us yet," reassured Archie in a whisper. "Just bluff it out." Aloud he said to one of them (it was the lady who expertly curled feathers): "Do you know whether Mrs. Neal is in, Mrs. Higgs? We've come to see her."

"I don't know as she is, Mr. Archie," replied the other, her eyes taking avid note of Joan's smart tailor-made dress and traveling hat. "But I know she's expectin' company all right, 'cause I been smellin' comp'ny cookin' all day! Go right up and make yourselves to hum," she urged, with the never-failing hospitality of her class.

Archibald led his wife up the dim, curved stairway that had doubtless known the reluctant feet of many another bride before her, and opened Ellen's door with a key.

"Yon are honored," murmured Joan. "I didn't dream that Ellen had got to the point of trusting gentlemen with her latch-key!"

"Look!" said Archie proudly.

The room was gay with flowers, truly a bridal bower; and in its center stood the old round walnut table she had known all her life, much battered by the kicking of her own youthful toes, set for two, and laden with delicacies. There was a small but magnificent wedding-cake, there was chicken-salad, crisp pink tongue, pickles, chocolates of Joan's favorite brand, and resting in a pail of ice-water, its neck swathed in a napkin, a bottle of champagne.

"Cinnamon-rolls keeping hot in the warmer, butter in the ice-box right-hand side, and I'm only to light the jet under the coffee-pot, and leave it to bubble ten minutes—" murmured Archie, as one reciting a well-conned lesson.

Joan's listlessness suddenly disappeared. She hugged him.

"What a perfectly beautiful wedding-supper!" she cried. "Was it your idea, or Ellen's?"

"A sort of combination, I guess. She thought you might feel more homelike here with your mother's things, and I—well, it's my home too, you see!—So you don't mind?"

"Mind!" she winked hard to keep the tears back. "Archie, let's have pancakes, too!" she cried.

They had pancakes. They also had eggs, in the scrambling of which Archibald was quite expert. Afterwards they washed the pans and dishes together, with two of Ellen's aprons tied around their necks, amid much merriment.

"I had no idea married life was so pleasant!" she sighed. "Archie, let's always do our work like this, together!"

"Work?" he picked up one of her hands and examined it reverently. Joan had rather beautiful hands, sensitive and lithe, delicately white, with rosy palms and finger-tips. "I'll let you play at work now and then," he said soberly. "But work is for us men, my Joan, not for our women!"

"It's fortunate the cooks and housemaids of the land don't agree with you," she teased; "or perhaps they do, and hence the servant problem!"

Later, they locked Ellen's door and put the key under the mat, and went up a flight higher. Joan entered Archie's room with some curiosity. To her, people's environment spoke a clear language; and sometimes she realized, with a little shock, that she knew nothing at all of the man she had married.

It was a long, low attic chamber, whose ceiling sloped cosily down over casement windows with wide sills. There was a fine fireplace, marred, however, by a small stove showing evidences of occasional culinary efforts.

The results of Archie's twigging were very apparent; notably the golden-oak rocking-chair, the "chiffoneer" surmounted by the bronze lady with a spear. But she was more interested in the things which had belonged to him.

As Ellen had told her, the place was littered with books, shelves, tables, and even window-sills. Joan examined these eagerly. There was a very shabby Shakespeare in a good edition, an old pocket Emerson, a new Rubaiyat, a brand-new "Alice in Wonderland" (which made her smile); but it was no scholar's library. Archie's tastes were not what he would have called "high-brow." The works of Marie Corelli and Conan Doyle predominated, with several school geographies and histories, and various treatises on the psychology of salesmanship. She found something rather touching in this collection of books, remembering that he had referred to it as his college career.

She looked next for his pictures, those other sure indications of the inner man. But there were none, except the small photograph of herself in its elaborate frame, with a little vase attached holding fresh flowers.

"Archie!" she protested, laughing, "I look like a Madonna in a shrine!"

"One of those namby-pamby parties with a dinner-plate behind her head? Never saw one of them that could touch you!" he pronounced candidly.

"I fear your correspondence-course has been neglecting Art," she murmured. "There was a fellow named Botticelli who did some very neat little things in that line. But come now, surely you've got some other pictures hidden away somewhere? No naughty ballet-girls kicking up their limb-legs? No bareback ladies? Or Parisiennes exhibiting wicked garters? Honest Injun?"

He grinned sheepishly. "I did have," he admitted. "But I sort of lost my taste for 'em when you gave me that picture of you."

She kissed him.

"That's a prettier compliment than the little vase of flowers before my picture, dear!..."

Archie had been standing at the door, watching her progress around his room with eyes that were almost incredulous. His room!—and she in it!... He felt that if he opened a window she might flutter out again, back into the world from which she came. Once, when he was very small, he had found a belated autumn butterfly in the street, and brought it home, and put it on a geranium-plant he had in the window, hoping it might like to spend the winter there. But in the morning it lay dead against the pane. Archie remembered that butterfly now, and shivered. She saw him.

She ensconced herself in the largest and shabbiest of his three chairs and patted the arm of it invitingly. "Come over here, and let's really talk!" she commanded.

He obeyed. "What shall we talk about?"

"Tell me about your mother," said Joan.

He told her what he could remember. It was not much except a voice—a soft English voice; and the feeling of arms that held him close; and quite clearly the sound of sobbing beside his pillow whenever he woke suddenly at night.

"Nothing was ever heard from her after she left you here?"

"Oh, yes. Money came once or twice to the landlady for my board—this was a boarding-house, then. But after a few months it stopped coming."

"And haven't you any idea what became of her?"

"She died, of course," said Archie simply. "Or she'd have come back for me. There were people who thought—" he swallowed hard—"that she left me here on purpose, and never meant to come back. That isn't so. I don't know much about her, but I do know that she loved her child. You, can't fool a kid about that!... And there were people who thought she killed herself. But I don't somehow believe she was a quitter. What do you think?"

He had taken a photograph out of his pocket, and handed it to Joan, who studied it closely. Despite the unbecoming "fringe" and jersey of an earlier day, it was a lovely face she saw, without a hint of folly or weakness or worse. The chin was firm as Archie's, the features strong as they were delicate. The face was still rounded and soft with youth, yet out of it looked a pair of haunted eyes.

"No, your mother was no coward," she said with conviction. "But she was a very unhappy woman. And Archie—she was a lady!" The look of race seemed to her unmistakable.

He drew a great breath. "I think so, too," he said gladly, "I've always thought so. That's how I dared—" Suddenly, passionately, he drew her up into his arms. "Oh, my Joan, do you see why I wanted you here in my own home? It's all the home I've ever had. Anything that's happened to me has happened here. I've lain here at night trying to be a man when I was nothing more than a kid. I've sat here listening, listening—Oh, for years I used to think I heard my mother coming up the stairs to get me, long after I was old enough to know she never would! And sometimes I thought—Do you believe in ghosts?"

"Yes!" said Joan. "Ghosts of people that love us and want to help—"

"That's what I mean! And that's why I wanted to stay on in this room, where—she could find me. It's a horrible thing not to belong anywhere, nor to any one, like any little fyst dog in the streets. I've never said this before—"

"I know!" whispered Joan.

"And now that I do belong to some one, I wanted my room to know it. I wanted—in case there were any ghosts—"

"I know," whispered Joan again, her lips against his.

There was a taste of salt on them, and she held him close and closer, this great, lonely child who should never be lonely again. If, as she had warned him, she was not capable of offering deep love, Joan could at least offer deep understanding, which perhaps is rarer....

And presently as she held him so in the quiet of his old room, with the house settling into drowsiness about them, and the sycamore tapping its friendly signal on the roof close above their heads, Joan's identity seemed to be slipping, merging, into that of some one else. She ceased to be Joan the girl. She felt, in that strange moment of transition, partly the wife, and partly the mother; but most of all the woman, whose mission is to give.