He handed her the signed check and started for the door then suddenly turned back and came to her again.
“Good-bye!” he said and half put out his hand. But before her hand could go out surprisedly to meet his, he suddenly stepped close and put his arm around her, drawing her close for an instant, and kissing her softly, tenderly on her lips.
“Good-bye…Margaret!” he said again and was gone before she could recover from her amazement.
Margaret stood there in the office trembling from head to foot with joy and awe. The thrill of his kiss was still on her lips. The joy of his arms around her enveloped her like a garment, and the blood went pounding through her veins.
Presently her senses began to assume some degree of their normal poise and she was able to think connectedly. She had been so careful and dignified, and this had happened! Without any warning, he had kissed her! And she couldn’t by any sort of juggling make herself feel that it was just a casual brotherly kiss. There had been devotion and tenderness in it. It was precious to remember. And yet she had no right to presume upon it. Perhaps he didn’t feel the way she did that people mustn’t go around kissing promiscuously. He hadn’t seemed like the kind of a young man who would kiss a girl just from friendliness because he happened to be going away, but perhaps that was it. She simply mustn’t count it anything else. Her grandmother’s words were still ringing in her ears, and she must guard herself from allowing any playing with holy things. A kiss was not a thing to be given lightly. If he ever came back from his ride in the air, she would have to make him understand that—that is, if he ever attempted such a thing again—unless—Well she mustn’t consider any “unless.” She must keep her principles and make them clear. Yet she knew in her heart that if he never came back, if some dire disaster should happen to him on the way, she would treasure that kiss through the rest of her life and count it the most precious thing that earth held for her. Well, life was full of a strange lot of complications, and she suddenly roused to the act that she had an immediate duty. So she rushed to the telephone, her cheeks rosy now, her heart crying out to her, fairly screaming to her, that she loved Greg and she never could undo it. She loved him with all her soul and was glad—glad that he had kissed her good-bye.
And yet when a few minutes later, having held a brief conversation with Rhoderick Steele, she called Greg’s hotel, her voice was cool and impersonal and she was prepared to let one Gregory Sterling know that she had ignored that kiss. That she wasn’t even considering it as a fact in her history.
But unfortunately for her resolve, she was told by the hotel clerk that Mr. Sterling had just left for Virginia. She was too late after all, and she was glad of that, too. Nothing he or she could say could change that kiss or spoil its beauty for a few days at least. Probably not until he came back. And for that brief time it was hers to think about, at least when she couldn’t possibly help doing so.
Greg came back Wednesday morning, briskly, joyously. He looked her fairly in the eyes with a radiant smile. He spoke eagerly on business matters at once.
“I’m going to need you this afternoon,” he said. “Can you arrange to go with me right after lunch, about one o’clock, say?”
Margaret had schooled herself to be calm when he came, but her voice was a bit tremulous as she answered. She decided in a flash that he had forgotten that kiss, and she would forget it, too. It was likely just an impulse he had, and she wasn’t going to leave him standing. He might think she had an evil mind if she did.
“I could go,” she answered quietly, “but there were some people telephoned this morning. They are coming in to look the books over. And there are still some of those envelopes not addressed yet.”
“That’s all right,” said Greg confidently. “How about that niece of Mrs. Harris? Isn’t she here yet? Mrs. Harris was worried that she hadn’t any job. We’ll just commandeer her and let her try her hand addressing envelopes and meeting the people. And if she’s got any brains at all, she ought to be able to tell people about the books. Of course it’s better to have a Christian person do it, and maybe she is, but we can’t tell till we find out. Suppose you call her in, and I’ll give her a little information about the literature. We may need her help from now on if I carry out some of my plans, so we’d better see how capable she is.”
In amazement and some trepidation, Margaret called Jane Garrett and then went back to her desk. She sat there trying to finish what she had been doing when he came in, but her thoughts went wild and her hand trembled. It wasn’t going to be so easy to ignore what had happened if she had to go out with him alone.
But she need not have been afraid. Greg was not going to trouble her with any attentions. He was all intent on his business.
“We’re going shopping,” he told her gleefully as she came out to the car wearing her very best secretarial manner. “I need quite a good many things at once.”
But he turned the car quite away from the shopping district and rushed out into the country as fast as he could go.
“Oh, I thought you said you were going shopping,” said Margaret at last in a small voice when the silence had lasted quite awhile. Greg had seemed absorbed in his own thoughts.
“I am,” he said pleasantly, “but I didn’t say where. You see, the first thing on my list is a house. I’m going to throw a party, you know, and I have to have a house to have it in.”
“Oh,” said Margaret quite startled. “Are you really serious about that party? But you aren’t going to have to find a house just to have a party in, surely! Why, I presume Mrs. Harris might take in my people for a few days. They could have my room, and I would sleep with Jane Garrett. Then you could take your friend to the hotel if he came.”
“My friends!” said Greg emphatically. “He’s married now, you know, and they are both coming. Then I thought we’d ask Mrs. Harris and Jane, and Miss Gowen the nurse, and perhaps a few people who haven’t any nice times and need them. We’ll want a few children for Christmas Day at least. I guess we can scare some up somewhere. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a few children. How could one do that in a hotel? Mrs. Harris’s house is all right, but that’s my place of business. I couldn’t see having a house party there. No, I’ve got to have a house. I may need it later myself anyway.”
“Oh!” said Margaret in a meek voice.
After a few more minutes of silence, Margaret spoke again.
“Did you have a pleasant wedding?”
“Some wedding!” said Greg. “I’d like mine to be like that. No fuss and feathers. They only had a few friends of the family, and it was in a little white church almost two hundred years old. The bride wore a dress that her great-great-grandmother wore, but nobody else was dolled up much. She’s lovely. I want you to know her. You’ll like her, I know. She’s the only girl I ever knew that I thought was some like you.”
Margaret’s cheeks glowed at that, but she answered gravely, “I shall be glad to know her.”
They swept into a long, smooth road bordered with high hedges on either hand.
“There are two houses on this road for sale, and one for rent. One of them is furnished. I don’t know whether I’d like that or not. You might not think the furniture was right. I like your ideas of furniture.”
“Thank you,” said Margaret, trying to smile formally, “but I should think you were the one to be suited, not I.”
“Well, you see, I prefer your taste to my own, so that makes it all right,” said Greg.
Then suddenly he brought the car to a stop before a tall iron fence bordering a hillside slope with a beautiful low-spread stone house at the top set against a background of deep, dark pines and hemlocks and spruces. Rhododendrons and laurel clustered around the stone terraces, making the place look alive in contrast to the dead brownness of the fields and trees around.
“Oh, isn’t that beautiful!” exclaimed Margaret, shaken out of her gravity. “I never have seen a more wonderful place!”
“It suits me all right!?
?? said Greg. “Let’s go in!”
“What?” said Margaret. “You don’t mean—”
“Yes, this is one of them. This is the one that’s furnished. The family has gone bankrupt, and they’ve taken what they’ve hoarded and gone to Europe to live more cheaply. It’s for sale at a song compared to what it cost.”
“Oh, but even at that it must be some song!” said Margaret, awed. “You don’t mean you would buy a house like that just for a house party! You aren’t entirely crazy, you know!”
Greg laughed.
“Not for a house party alone. Not just for one house party! If I went there to live, I’d have a good many of God’s kind of dinner parties, I’m thinking. The poor and the lame and the blind. It looks as if there is room enough, and that’s what I want. There are several acres of land here, and that leaves room for some of the things I want to do. Building small, pretty houses not too close together to give men work, and giving people houses they can afford where they can get out of the city. I’ve got a vision, too, of a Bible school somewhere nearby, and the little houses will do for the students to live in while they are studying. I mean to make every workman take an hour’s Bible study, too, evenings, while they work here. That’ll be a condition of being hired. I don’t intend anybody to be helped here in a financial way without knowing the truth about salvation and what’s the matter with the world today and a few other things before they leave us.”
“Oh! Wonderful!” breathed Margaret as they turned into the great stone gateway and swept up the smooth drive. She began to look at Greg in a new light now. She forgot to wonder what his attitude toward herself was. She suddenly went under and out of sight. She was one of God’s children listening to the plan of a remarkable testimony, glad to be one of the smallest units of that plan.
“There’s a stone chapel up the road a little way. It used to be a church, but it’s been abandoned for a long time. I thought maybe I could get hold of that, and I want to get Steele and his wife up here. He can teach and preach there, for a beginning, and maybe a school will grow out of that. I hadn’t naturally much time to talk it over with him, but he’ll be up here for Christmas.”
They swung up to the porte cochere, and Greg stopped the car. He took out some keys, got out, and began to fit one in the door.
“You are really going in?” asked Margaret in awe again.
“Surely. I got the keys from the agent and some of the facts, but I wanted you to pass on it first.”
He flung back the massive door of the mansion and led her in.
“It’s rather cold here,” he said, looking at her sharply. “Are you warmly dressed?”
“Oh yes,” said Margaret, enchanted with the vista before her. “I won’t be cold!”
Before her a great room stretched to low, broad windows at the other side, looking into the deep green of the woods. An enormous fireplace almost filled one end of the room, with a wide doorway at either side, and the other end was equally occupied by the leaded panes of a vast bookcase filled with books. Soft tones of oriental rugs put color into the scene, and here and there a great painting held one’s attention. A gallery ran across one length of the room, showing other vistas of rooms with latticed windows opening into the gallery. It was a place to make one exclaim, and Margaret exclaimed.
“Oh, I’m glad I have seen one such lovely house!” she said delightedly. “It looks like a palace, and yet it looks like a home!”
“It does, doesn’t it?” said Greg, watching her face tenderly. “And yet the people who owned it had several other homes.
One in the city, one in Palm Beach, one in the mountains, one in Maine, and a castle abroad.”
“How could they bear to leave this when they had brought all these lovely things together!” said the girl, putting her hand out and touching the soft texture of a drapery.
“I suspect the getting of these things together was the work of some interior decorator like yourself,” said Greg. “It is only people who have the home vision who could really make a home out of a palace. Now come let us look through the rooms.”
He took her arm and led her through the rooms, up the stairs, and finally down again.
“Now,” said he, looking down in her face, drawing her arm a little closer in his own. “Tell me, Margaret, will this house do, or must we look farther?”
“Do?” she echoed wonderingly, painfully conscious that he had called her Margaret again. “Do! It is wonderful! It is marvelous!”
“Yes, it is all that, but could you make a home here, a real home, where you would be happy, and where your dear family could be with you and feel at home?”
“Oh,” said Margaret, trying to keep her balance. “Could I? Couldn’t anybody? I am not the one to be considered, of course, but I can’t see why anybody wouldn’t think a home here would be the next thing to heaven!”
“But you are the one to be considered, Margaret! You are the only one. Don’t you know that if you won’t consent to make a home for me somewhere, then I’ll never have one on this earth? Don’t you know that I love you better than my own life and want nothing better than to have you always by my side? Darling, you don’t know how I’ve missed you these last three days. Oh Margaret, could you love me?”
He held out his arms, and Margaret went into them and hid her face against his. Then all the joy of her dreams, all the thrill of sweetness that real earthly love can have for two human beings who also know the love of the Lord Jesus, seemed to be revealed to these two in that first precious moment.
Suddenly Greg realized that the house was cold and that it was dangerous for them to stay there any longer, and reluctantly they tore themselves away from the enchanted place, which seemed to have become in the last hour their own and already filled with pleasant memories.
“We’ve shopped enough for one day,” said Greg as he took his place beside Margaret in the car, stopping first to draw her into his arms once more and press his lips to hers. “Oh my darling! To think you’re mine, and I’m going to have you with me all the time! No going back to a lonely hotel at night! When can we be married? Would you like it to be at Christmas in the little chapel, with your people here and Steele to marry us? Or shall we just go and get married right now tonight by any preacher we can find?”
Margaret laughed joyously.
“Oh you child!” she bantered. “Of course we’ll wait till they all come. It would be beautiful that way! Shall it be on Christmas Day?”
“Yes, on Christmas Day after we’ve opened our stockings and had our gifts, and we’ll have the tree the night before. On Christmas Day in the morning! How will that be? I’d like you to be my Christmas bride. Do you think your family will be satisfied with me?”
“Satisfied!” Margaret laughed, nestling close to him. “You don’t know how they adore you. I’d be almost afraid to tell you all they both said about you. It might spoil you, and I wouldn’t have you spoiled for the world.”
When they got back to the office, they found some people there, and it was not for half an hour that they had the room to themselves. Having dismissed Jane Garrett to the other part of the house, they discovered there were letters for them both from Vermont. They read them sitting on the big leather couch, Greg’s arm around Margaret, her hand in his.
Suddenly Margaret looked up from her letter, her face all a-sparkle.
“You’ve paid the mortgage off! Oh Gregory, you darling angel! If I never loved you before, I’d love you now. What a wonderful surprise to give them!”
Then she drew Greg’s face down to her own and proceeded to reward him tenderly.
“That’s wonderful!” he said emerging from her embrace at last, “but you don’t need to lay so much stress on that mortgage. Don’t you know I’m figuring to go up there and spend all my summers, and sometimes get there in the winter also?”
Then he caught her in his arms again and drew her close.
“My darling! My little Christmas bride!” he whispered. “Oh, God has been go
od, good to me! I can never thank Him enough!”
There is no telling how long they would have sat there talking, planning what they would get for the Grandmother and Grandfather for Christmas, how they would have the wedding, who should be invited, and all the precious details of such an affair. But suddenly they heard footsteps, the footsteps of prim, little Mrs. Harris coming along the hall briskly to find out why Margaret didn’t come when the dinner bell rang.
Greg had presence of mind always. When Mrs. Harris opened the door, the light had been snapped on and Greg was sitting decorously at his desk reading his letters. Margaret was at her typewriter putting in a sheet of paper.
Mrs. Harris went her way, and Margaret presently came to supper, her cheeks rosy, on her lips a smile. She was thinking how that first kiss he had given her would always be hers now, anyway. And how his voice had sounded when he had called her his little Christmas bride.
Chapter 20
There were busy days for the next three weeks for both Greg and Margaret.
Every morning Margaret would take the first two hours at least in the office, inducting Jane Garrett into the work, opening the morning mail, answering the telephone, and talking with various callers who came. For Greg’s intensive distribution of literature throughout the city and vicinity was beginning to bear fruit. Hungry people—hungry for the Word of God—were coming like bees to the honey, and there was no day in the week and scarcely more than an hour or two of the business day when there was not someone to ask for more free literature or to examine the rare collection of devotional and helpful books and pamphlets. Jane Garrett was proving an apt pupil and getting her eyes opened at the same time to a good many truths that she had never heard of before. And Mrs. Harris beamed with pleasure. To have a prospect of keeping her precious niece near her instead of letting her go back to the Midwest to an ill-paid job was all that Mrs. Harris now asked of life.