Neither he nor her mother dared to look at her as she was hearing these awful disclosures of the downfall of her hopes and the impending brutalities to her pride and vanity. She picked up the note, opened it slowly, read it--a few polite formal sentences, setting forth that he had “yielded to the insuperable obstacles interposed by your father.”
She dropped the sheet and pirouetted round the room in and out between the chairs occupied by her frightened parents--they thought her suddenly gone mad from the shock. “Who says I ain’t the luckiest girl on earth?” she exclaimed.
“What are you talking about, Jenny?” demanded her mother sharply.
“Why, I married Tom Burster half an hour ago. He’s putting the notices in all the papers for to-morrow morning. Everybody’ll think I changed my mind and shook Frothingham. And I did, too!”
“Jenny!” exclaimed her father. “Tom Burster!”
“And he’s coming here to dinner, if you don’t object,” she continued. “If you do, why I’ll join him and we’ll go away and give you a chance to cool off.” She caught her father by the beard. “What do you say, daddy? Say yes, or I’ll pull.”
“Yes,” replied her father with a huge sigh of relief--his daughter was contented; her and their vanity would be spared; Tom Burster would not demand or want a dower; he was not only independent, but also one of the most forward young “self-made” rich men in Chicago. “You’ve got more sense than all the rest of the family put together,” he exclaimed proudly, patting her on the head.
And in an absent, reflective tone she said: “I always felt I’d have some use for Tom sooner or later.”
Frothingham’s abrupt change of tactics had been caused by a cablegram from Evelyn which reached him at the Barneys’ even as his diplomatic agent was in the heat and toil of the negotiations with Amzi Hooper. It read:
Break off everything and return. Have written you New York. Best possible news. Gwen sends love.
“Why didn’t she say what it was?” he wondered. And he decided that it must be news of too private a nature to be trusted to the telegraph station at Beauvais. Why had she written if he was to go at once? “I suppose,” he concluded, “she was afraid I mightn’t obey orders. ‘Gwen sends love’--that must mean that the news is about me and Gwen.”