“You can’t refuse them, Beth—you can’t. You would quite break the Mater’s heart, dear—and mine!”
“How long are you really going to teach school, Beth?” demanded Ella some weeks later, after Beth had been to the State capital and passed her examination before the school board.
“Two years at least, my dear.”
“My goodness! do you suppose Larry will ever wait that long?”
“Larry will have to wait, my dear,” said the elder sister, firmly. Then her eyes suddenly sparkled. “He must wait, at least, until he can accomplish one particular thing.”
“What is that?” the flyaway sister demanded.
“Until he can afford to pay the cook’s wages out of his earnings as a ‘limb o’ the law.’”
It was about this time, too, in the lazy summer following Beth’s graduation that she received a letter from Molly Granger, in which was the following:
“So he agrees we are to wait till Captain John comes home to marry Aunt Carrie, and then we shall have a double wedding. At least two of ‘the Granger girls’ will not die old maids.