A mutinous murmur rose and circled the patients on the veranda. Not married at the San! It was unthinkable. So this point and the final date Sheila settled for them.
"We'll have the wedding in the gardens, save all the fuss and waste of picking the flowers, be ever so much prettier, and everybody and his neighbor can come."
When Hennessy heard of it he shirred his mouth into a pucker and whistled ecstatically. "'Tis like her, just! Married out-o'-doors wi' the growin' things to stand up wi' her and the blessed sun on her head. Faith, Hennessy will have to be scrubbin' up the swans an' puttin' white satin bows round their necks."
Sheila chose the hour before sunset on an early day of June, and the San speedily set itself to the task of praying off the rain and arranging the delightful details of attendants, refreshments, music, and all the other non-essentials of a successful wedding. Miss Maxwell, the superintendent of nurses, took the trousseau in hand and portioned out piles of napery and underwear to the eager hands of the nurses to embroider. The whole sanitarium was suddenly metamorphosed into a Dorcas Society; patients forgot to be querulous, and refused extra rubbings and all unnecessary tending, that more stitches might be taken in the twenty-four hours of the hospital day. A great rivalry sprang up between the day and night nurses as to which group would finish the most, and old Mr. Crotchets, the cynical bachelor with liver complaint and a supposedly atrophied heart, offered to the winning shift the biggest box of candy New York could put up.
Through the first days of her happiness Sheila walked like a lambent being of another world, whose radiance was almost blinding. Those who had known her best, who had felt her warmth and beauty in spite of that bitterness which had been her shield against the hurt she had battled with so long, looked upon her now with unfathomable wonder. And Peter, who had worshiped her from the moment she had taken his hand and led him back to the ways of health, watched her as the men of olden times must have watched the goddesses that occasionally graced their earth.
"Beloved, you're almost too wonderful for an every-day, Sunday-edition newspaper-man like me," Peter whispered to her in the hush of one twilight, as they sat together in the rest-house, watching Hennessy feed the swans.