They are engaged. Uncle Parke and Miss Katherine are, and they are to be married on the twenty-seventh of June. That's my birthday. I will be thirteen on the twenty-seventh of June. They told me about it night before last. I was out on the porch, and Miss Katherine called me and told me she and Doctor Alden wanted me to go to walk with them. I knew what was coming. Knew in a flash. But I pretended not to, and thanked her ever so much, and told her I'd just love to go. We walked on down to the Calverton road, talking about nothing, and making out it was our usual night walk, but when we got to the seven maples Uncle Parke stopped. "Suppose we sit down," he said. "It's too warm to walk far to-night." And after we sat he threw his hat on the ground, then leaned over and took my hands in his. "Mary Cary," he began. And though his eyes were smiling, his voice was real quivering. I was noticing, and it was. "Mary Cary, Katherine and I have brought you with us to-night to ask if you have any objection to our being married. We would like to do so as soon as possible--if you do not object." He turned my face to his, and the look in his eyes was grand. It meant no matter who objected, marry her he would; but it was a way to tell me--the way he was asking, and I understood. "It depends," I said, and, as I am always playing parts to myself, right on the spot I was a chaperon lady. "It depends on whether you love enough. Do you?" "I do. For myself I am entirely sure. As to Katherine--Suppose she tells you what she thinks." I turned toward her. "Do you, Miss Katherine? It takes--I guess it takes a lot of love to stand marriage. Do you think you have enough?" In the moonlight her face changed like her opal ring when the cream becomes pink and the pink red. "I think there is," she said. Then: "Oh, Mary Cary, why are you such a strange, strange child?" And she threw her arms around me and kissed me twenty times. After a while, after we'd talked and talked, and they'd told me things and I'd told them things, I said I'd consent. "But if the love ever gives out, I'm not going to stay with you," I said. "I'm never going to be fashionable and not care for love. A home without it is hell." "Mercy, Mary!" Uncle Parke jumped. "Don't use such strong language. It isn't nice." "But it's true. I read it in a book, and I've watched the Rices. When there's love enough you can stand anything. When there isn't, you can stand nothing. Living together every day you find out a lot you didn't know, and love can't keep still. It's got to grow or die." Then I jumped up. "I always could talk a lot about things I didn't understand," I said. "But I consent." And I flew down the road and left them. I've written it out on a piece of paper, about their being engaged, and looked at it by night and by day since they told me about it. I've said it low, and I've said it loud, but I can't realize it, and the little sense the Lord gave me He has taken away.