"I would like to give all the children on the island--" began Margaret.
"All the other children--" corrected Graeme.
"All the children--including Hennie and you and me--the jolliest feast they've ever had in their lives, the day we are married."
"Of course we will, and the doctor shall get in an extra supply of palliatives. They shall look back in after years and say--'Do you remember that feast we had when the loveliest of all the angels came down from heaven and was married to that delightful Englishman?'--Briton, I ought to say! I do wish our dear old Lady Elspeth could be here. How she would enjoy it!--'That feast,' they will say, 'when we were all ill for a month after and the doctor died of overwork.' They will date back to it as ancient peoples did to the Flood. It will be a Great White Stone Day to generations to come. Let us hope there will be no new white stones over yonder"--nodding in the direction of the churchyard--"in commemoration of that great day."
"We will draw the line short of that," said Margaret seriously.
"We'll give them all the gâche they can eat--home-made, and such as their constitutions are accustomed to,--and fruit and frivolities from Guernsey. I'll go across the Saturday before--"
"Of course we will. We older children will go, and we'll take Nurse with us,"--with a bow towards Hennie Penny,--"and we'll make a day of it, and have ices again at that place in the Arcade, and then we'll go round the shops and clear them out for the benefit of Sark."
They had already made one trip to Guernsey, crossing by the early Saturday boat and returning the same evening.
"We're feeling frightfully fossilised at having bought nothing, except what we absolutely needed, for nearly a month," said Miss Penny. "From that point of view I should imagine the Garden of Eden may have been just a trifle slow--"
"Ah, you see, Mother Eve hadn't had the advantages of a superior education," said Graeme.
"And there are some fripperies we simply _must_ have," said Miss Penny, "even for a runaway wedding like this. You see, when we decided to come here we had no idea how much farther we were going, and so we couldn't possibly provide. Of course if we had known you were here--"