“But--” Victoria cried aghast, “we haven’t settled _anything_ yet. It’s half past ten and we haven’t even called up the papers, nor cancelled the special train. We don’t even know yet what we’re going to tell people.” “What should we tell them? Why should we cancel the train? Let them come and see for themselves.” “Do you mean,” Victoria demanded aghast, “that we should let everybody we know come down here for the wedding, and then turn them away at the gate with the word that there isn’t going to be any?” “No,” said the old woman. “Why turn them away? Bring them in. Feed them, just as we’d meant to do. Introduce them to Mr. and Mrs. William Grant here. Tell them they were married this morning. They’ll have to know it some time and it might as well be now.” “But,” Victoria cried, voiceless almost with horror, “what will they think?” “They’ll have to think what they please,” old Mrs. Corbin declared. “After all, we’ve lived here a long while and we’ve always managed our own concerns. We’re going to manage this.” * * * * * And that, as of course you know if you remember our newspaper history three months back, is what those Corbins did. There has been, so far as I know, only one event productive of a similar sort of excitement, out in these parts, in living memory. But this reception at The Oaks was an indisputable victory for the old woman who had willed it. For two hours she sat, very splendidly dressed, in her wheel chair on the lawn like a sovereign on her throne, Belden at her left hand announcing her guests as they came up--superfluously in most instances since her memory for names and faces, especially old names and faces, was astonishingly good. Some she greeted ceremoniously, some with her familiar abruptness, some with an offered hand and some without, but in every case her discrimination was perfect. And in every case, I believe, she passed them on to her son without a word of explanation. She was enjoying it, there can be no doubt of that. Her amazing endurance can’t be accounted for otherwise. Victoria was as good as she was, really superb. I pause to pay tribute to the accuracy of Bill Grant’s estimate of her. She would yield, he had predicted, to the proved inevitable. He’ll get on with his mother-in-law, that young man. Well, they got away with it, that’s what it all comes to. There wasn’t a hint of apology discernible along the line.