ousekeeper. He is only
sixty-five, and as hale and hearty as a man can be. You have served your
time, and surely you need not be his drudge for the rest of your life.
Mark and I thought you would spend half the year with us."

Waitstill waived this point as too impossible for discussion. "When and
where were you married, Patty?" she asked.

"In Allentown, New Hampshire, last Monday, the day you and father went
to Saco. Ellen went with us. You needn't suppose it was much fun for me!
Girls that think running away to be married is nothing but a lark, do
not have to deceive a sister like you, nor have a father such as mine to
reckon with afterwards."

"You thought of all that before, didn't you, child?"

"Nobody that hasn't already run away to be married once or twice could
tell how it was going to feel! Never did I pass so unhappy a day! If
Mark was not everything that is kind and gentle, he would have tipped me
out of the sleigh into a snowbank and left me by the roadside to
freeze. I might have been murdered instead of only married, by the way I
behaved; but Mark and Ellen understood. Then, the very next day,
Mark's father sent him up to Bridgton on business, and he had to go to
Allentown first to return a friend's horse, so he couldn't break the
news to father at once, as he intended."

"Does a New Hampshire marriage hold good in Maine?" asked Waitstill,
still intent on the bare facts at the bottom of the romance.

"Well, of course," stammered Patty, some-what confused, "Maine has
her own way of doing things, and wouldn't be likely to fancy New
Hampshire's. But nothing can make it wicked or anything but according
to law. Besides, Mark considered all the difficulties. He is wonderfully
clever, and he has a clerkship in a Portsmouth law office waiting for
him; and that's where we are going to live, in New Hampshire, where we
were married, and my darling sister will come soon and stay months and
months with us."

"When is Mark coming back to arrange all this?"

"Late to-night or early to-morrow morning. Where did you go after
you were married?"

"Where did I go?" echoed Patty, in a childish burst of tears. "Where
could I go? It took all day to be married--all day long, working and
driving hard from sunrise to seven o'clock in the evening. Then when we
reached the bridge, Mark dropped me, and I walked up home in the dark,
and went to bed without any supper, for fear that you and father would
come back and catch m