"I'm an old lady, my dear." Harley gave one of his hearty, incredulous laughs.

"You, old.

You're one of the everlasting young ones, you are, Lil," and he stood and beamed with love and admiration.
"But I've got you, Geordie," she added, and her surprised heart that had suddenly felt so empty warmed again and was soothed when he took her hand eagerly and pressed it to his lips.
Grandfather and Grandmother Ludlow, Joan and many others who had formed the habit of believing that Christopher Ludlow's widow would remain true to his memory, failed utterly to understand the reason for her sudden breakaway from a settled and steady routine, to plunge into belated matrimony with a self-made man of fifty-five who seemed to them to be not only devoid of all attractiveness but bourgeois and rather ridiculous.

But why?
A little sympathy, a little knowledge of human nature,--that's all that was necessary to make this romance understandable.

Because it was romance, in the best sense of that much abused word.