“Well, I’ll see,” father called back from the gate, as he hurried off to his office at last, and Betty smiled to herself and wondered whether Nan wanted a set of new books or the Smallest Sister a bicycle. “Father always says that when he thinks you’re getting pretty extravagant in your tastes, but still he’s going to let you have it all the same,” reflected Betty, and started for the third time to reread Mary’s letter.
“Dearest Betty,” it began, “I’ve left you till the last to write to because you aren’t going to the ends of the earth within the week, and you don’t take ages to make up your mind to things. In short, my child, I know that this impromptu wedding idea will appeal to you and that you will keep your promise to help Roberta do the bridesmaid act just as nicely as if I’d told you six weeks ahead instead of one, and then sent you a neatly engraved invitation at the proper hour and minute. We want to be married next Thursday at three, because—oh, dear, here comes George Garrison Hinsdale this minute, and I promised to be ready to take him to call on my minister. I’ll tell you why we changed our minds when I see you. You and Roberta and Laurie are to stay with me, and the others are invited to Tilly Root’s, just across the street. There’s a dinner Wednesday night, before the rehearsal. Oh, about clothes,—just wear your graduating dress or anything else that you and Roberta agree upon. Let me know your train. Oh, and you won’t draw a present, because I wanted all the girls to come, so I sent tickets to K. and Rachel and Helen. I hope they won’t feel hurt, and that you won’t mind not having diamond sunbursts to remember the occasion by. You see I couldn’t give diamond sunbursts to some and railroad tickets to others. It would have spoiled the scheme of decoration.
“I wanted to tell you how I caught Madeline’s coat-tails just as she was going on board her boat, but George Garrison Hinsdale refuses to wait another second. I foresee that I have drawn a tyrannical husband. And the moral of that is,—I’m too happy to care.
“Yours ever,
“Mary.”
Before she wrote to Mary, Betty puzzled out most of Madeline’s letter, which gave an amusing account of her sudden change of plans. “Eleanor came to see me off,” she wrote, “and Dick Blake was there with his arms full of flowers for me and his eyes fastened tight to Eleanor, and all the good Bohemians were saying fond farewells and sending messages to daddy and telling when they’d probably turn up in Sorrento, when up dashed Mary Brooks and her professor. And in five minutes Dick had sold my cabin to a man he knew who had come down on the chance of getting one and that boat had sailed without me and my flowers and my steamer trunk and my ‘carry-all-and-more-too’; and my weeping chaperon that I had not yet wasted time in hunting up is probably sending wireless messages of condolence to my family this minute. But Dr. Hinsdale cabled, and then Dick took the whole crowd to a roof-garden to cool off, and after that he and I went down the Bowery giving away that armful of roses to the smallest, raggedest children we could find. So it was a very nice party, and of course I can go to Italy any time.Mad.”
And this is how it happened that just two weeks after they had parted, bravely trying not to show that they cared, “The Merry Hearts,”—or at least the Chapin House division of them, with the B’s thrown in for full measure,—met, one sultry July afternoon, on Mary’s big, vine-shaded piazza and, chattering like magpies, drank inordinate quantities of lemonade and iced tea and heard from the bride-to-be all the whys and wherefores of her impromptu wedding.
“Haven’t I told any of you why we changed?” asked Mary. “No, Babe, it wasn’t because we hadn’t the strength of mind to wait till August. It was because my Uncle Marcellus gave us a desert island up on the Maine Coast for a wedding present. Roberta, pass the cookies to yourself, please.”
“Query,” propounded K. gaily. “When given a desert island for a wedding present is it obligatory to take possession instantly or forever after keep away?”
“Don’t be foolish,” said Mary severely. “It was this way, don’t you see. The island has a gorgeous camp on it, and of course we want to go there for our honeymoon, and why shouldn’t we start early and stay all summer? If we had waited until the middle of August, as we planned, that desert island would have gone to waste for one whole month.”