“Oh, yes,” said Betty easily. “That is, I wrote to Mother to choose any day she preferred the week after Babbie’s. I’m too busy to think, and the day really doesn’t matter. It’s going to be at our Lakeside cottage, you know,—on the big back piazza, I guess, because that’s the prettiest, biggest room in the house.”
A few minutes later a maid brought a telegram to Betty: “Lakeside cottage burned down last night. How about that impromptu wedding? Will Wales.”
“Gracious, what a mess!” exclaimed Betty, and looked very sober for at least three minutes. Then she smiled again. “I’m glad that the cottage burned down now, if it had to burn at all. Lakeside is so dreadfully sandy, and now that we haven’t any house at all, I can just as well be married in the very place that I’ve always wanted to go to a wedding in. I can stay here quietly with Dorothy, except when I rush off to Babbie’s, and Nan can come up from Boston a lot easier than she can go to Cleveland, and Mother and Father and Will can come here as well as not. They’ve never seen the Tally-ho, and they ought to, before it stops being a little speck mine. And so I can be married in that little glade in Paradise—the one that widens out from the narrow path that looks like an aisle.”
“How lovely!” cried Madeline eagerly. “I should think that was nicer than any cottage! And the bridal party and the guests can go in boats—so much more romantic than carriages or motor-cars.”
“And the wedding feast can be a picnic,” laughed Betty. “Bob will be extra-specially delighted with that idea.”
“And the music——” began Madeline, when the maid interrupted again. This time it was callers.
“A lady and a gentleman,” Maggie explained. “They didn’t give no names.”
“The tribe of O’Toole,” Madeline guessed gaily, “come to reproach you for your prospective abandonment of their offspring, and for having let Straight Dutton give her that dreadful dictionary of slang. Her conversation is a mass of quotations from it.”
“Oh, dear, I hope they won’t be cross about anything,” sighed Betty, starting for the door.
“If they are, call me. I’ll finish them in short order,” Madeline promised savagely.