Then last and best of all in Lloyd's eyes was a splendid copy of the beautiful portrait of her grandmother Amanthis. I cannot distinguish it from the original that has always hung over the mantel in the drawing-room. The Colonel had a fine artist come on from New York to paint it, while Lloyd was at the seashore this summer.
She was so happy over it and all her heirlooms. She said she didn't want her father and mother to give her any new silver. They had talked about a full set. She said there was so much old family plate over at Oaklea, which she would far rather use. So godmother gave her a chest of linen, and Papa Jack some shares in the Arizona mines. She has actually seemed to take pleasure in the thought that she is marrying a poor man, and has been preparing for it all during her engagement by keeping her expenses within a certain limit instead of spending in the lavish way she has always been accustomed to. She's taken such pride too in learning all the housewifely arts that her grandmother and the Judge's wife were so noted for.
Eugenia and Stuart Tremont came several days ago, and Joyce came with them to be one of the bridesmaids. Phil could not leave his work just now long enough to come, but he sent the dearest little gift—a cut-glass honey dish and cover, with a honey spoon to go with it. The spoon is a flat gold one with a cluster of bees on the handle. The note he sent with it was dear, too, thanking her so beautifully for the inspiration and help her friendship had been to him, and for her good advice that sent him to "The School of the Bees."
Lloyd was so pleased that she hunted up a little unset turquoise he had once given her as a friendship stone, and Rob took it to town and had a jeweller set it into a tiny stick-pin for her, and she wore it as the "something blue" at her wedding.
Rob couldn't afford to give her an expensive present like the diamond pendant that Raleigh Claiborne gave Allison when they were married last summer, but it pleased Lloyd more than a queen's tiara could have done. It was just a little clasp to fasten her bridal veil. He had it made to order—only a four-leaf clover, but the fourth leaf was diamond-set, because, like the one Abdallah found in Paradise, it was the leaf of happiness.
It was just a quiet church wedding, as simple as it could possibly be made, in the late afternoon of one of the sweetest, goldenest October days that ever shone on the Valley. Only her most intimate friends were invited to the ceremony, because the little stone church is so small, but the doors were thrown open to everybody at the reception that followed at The Locusts.
Since the church has been frescoed inside and done over in soft cool greens, it makes me think of the heart of a deep beech woods. The light slips in through its narrow deep-set windows just as it does between the trees in the dim forest aisles. Lloyd wouldn't have it filled with hothouse roses. She said nothing could be as appropriate as the wild flowers growing all around it in the country lanes and meadows. So there was nothing but tall plumes of goldenrod nodding in every open window, while the altar was a bank of snowy asters. She wanted them she said because aster means star, and it was at the altar her happiness would be written for her in the stars.
She said, too, that as long as it was in the country and she needn't think of the conventions and could have things just as she pleased, she wanted it to be a white wedding—everybody in the bridal party to wear white. She said the old Colonel wouldn't look natural to her in anything else that time of year, and all the others would appear to better advantage. Every one said afterward what a beautiful picture it made. Rob and Malcolm and Keith and Ranald and Alex are all handsome young fellows anyhow, and they looked bigger and handsomer than ever in their immaculate white suits. Malcolm was best man and I was maid of honour. Kitty and Joyce and Katie Mallard were the bridesmaids. We girls carried armfuls of the starry asters and the men wore them as boutonnières.