Bell unfolded a flat piece of cardboard and formed it into a horn, which he attached to the cylinder player. He turned a tiny crank, winding the mechanism, put on a two-minute cylinder, and started it.

“Remember this? We saw the show on Broadway.”

“‘Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl,’” Marion answered when the first notes emerged thinly from the horn. The latest musical comedy sensation was a satire of the old 1890s romantic ballads.

Isaac Bell sang along in a credible baritone.

He treated her respectful as those villains always do,

And she supposed he was a perfect gent.

But she found diff’rent when one night she went with him to dine

Into a table d’hôte so blithe and gay.

And he says to her: After this we’ll have a demitasse!”

Marion sang,

Then to him these brave words the girl did say:

and took up the chorus:

Stand back, villain, go your way!

You may tempt the upper classes

With your villainous demitasses,

But Heaven will protect the working girl.”

Bell opened the bottle of Mumm and poured two glasses. “To what?” asked Marion.

“Love?”

“Love it is.”

They locked eyes, kissed, and drank. Bell changed cylinders, and strains of another new song, the romantic hit “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” played through the cardboard horn.

“May I have this dance?”

He took Marion in his arms and wove a waltz through the furniture as if the rolling, carpeted deck were a crowded dance floor. “Do you recall the first time I asked you to marry me?”

She pressed her cheek to his. “Yes. It was during an earthquake.”

“And the second?”

“In the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel. I said I was too old for you. You claimed that I was not.”

“And the third?”

“In New York. When you gave me this lovely emerald, which I thought too bright at first but have grown to love as our lucky charm.”

“And the fourth?”

“Above the Golden Gate. In your flying machine.”

“Will you marry me?”

“Of course.”

“Tomorrow,” said Isaac Bell.

“TOMORROW?”

Marion gave him a curious smile. The music stopped. She stepped back out of his arms, looked searchingly into his eyes, then down at her emerald ring. “Funny you should ask.”

“What is funny about a man asking his fiancée five times to marry him?”

She did not seem to hear him, but marveled, instead, “At the very last minute as I was racing to Euston Station to catch the boat train I made the driver stop at Hanover Square so I could run into Lucile’s to buy a dress. Obviously, there wasn’t time to make one, but a Russian woman I met in London told me that there was such a run on black dresses for mourning King Edward—it turned out he had many more mistresses than rumored—that Lucile’s had scads of not black dresses just hanging about, deeply discounted. I wanted to ask your opinion of it, before I wore it. Now I can’t.”