Mr. Parker insisted upon purchasing the dress—a duplicate of Cynthia’s. It was fine handkerchief linen, and Mrs. Brown, who made all Doris’ clothes, would make it up simply and beautifully, while Doris devoted all her spare minutes for weeks to certain individual touches of hand embroidery. Cynthia recklessly squandered a whole month’s pocket-money on the long, white suede gloves, and Grandma Brown unearthed from among her girlhood’s treasures a sandal-wood fan of delicious memory.
Doctor Brown brought home one day a small watch cased in gun-metal with Stella’s name on it, and Miss Morrison, who had gone back to the city to teach, sent a long, curiously wrought gun-metal chain.
But the most surprising contributions came from Uncle Si Wolcott and Miss Sophia. Uncle Si actually “hitched up” and drove to Westwood for the finest pair of bronze slippers and bronze silk stockings to be bought with money. Miss Sophia had tatted a handkerchief, but being impressed at the last minute with the apparent meanness of her offering as compared with the others, she unlocked a certain bureau drawer and took from it a quaint comb of carved ivory, fetched home from China by a seafaring ancestor, which gave the crowning touch to Stella’s strange beauty, set in the swirling masses of her blue-black hair.
The girl laughed and cried when she saw them, forgetting for once all her Indian stoicism, and stroked the lovely frock with reverent fingers, saying softly:
“Do you know, dears, I can love these clothes!”
There was one more gift, that came by mail on the very day of fate itself. It was a box just long enough to hold the diploma, the sandal-wood fan, the ivory comb, and any treasures worthy a place with these. It was cunningly made by hand out of fragrant, warm-hearted cedar-wood, fitted with a tiny lock and key, and decorated with a knife in conventionalized designs, chief of which was the recurring device of a five-pointed star. Doris and Cynthia were the only ones privileged to admire Ethan’s gift.
Next to the bride in the affections of rural New England stands the fair girl graduate, and that June day in Laurel was apparently quite given over to the triumphant parade of simple-hearted youth. In many a modest home, solicitous mothers were robing and adorning their daughters as if for the altar itself, and that evening in the town hall it seemed as if every soul in the village, old and young, rich and poor, must be pressing into a seat or peering curiously in at open door or window.
And now the orchestra struck up and the platform began to fill—that platform fluttering with banners and banked with the dark-green, glossy leaves and rosy chalices of the mountain laurel that gave the village its name. Pete Holley, a strapping youth of color, and star of the football team, took his place with dignity. Mary Maloney, the washer-woman’s daughter, more elaborately dressed than most, sat happily in the front row next to demure Doris, whose piano solo made a pleasing variation in the programme.