Fondly,
Azalea.
Dear Aunt Lorena:
I have just come home from the wedding of my dear Annie Laurie Pace to Samuel Disbrow. It was quite a sudden affair at the last. Of course they have been in love with each other for years, and it must be a year and a half since they became engaged. But they were both so busy superintending the dairy which Annie Laurie’s father left her, and following up their university extension course, that we had about decided, Carin and I, that they had forgotten all about getting married.
But it seems that we were mistaken. They were thinking about it all of the time.
The wedding was held in the Baptist church, and there were three ministers to make it what it should be. There was the Baptist minister, who belonged there, and the Methodist minister—Mr. Summers—who helped because Annie Laurie loved him, and there was old Mr. Mills, who came back from Florida to put on the finishing touches, because Annie Laurie had known him ever since she was a baby.
She looked glorious, did Annie Laurie, so tall and strong and fine, with her dark red hair burnished like a bird’s breast, all in her white, with her floating veil. Instead of bride’s roses she carried a bouquet of great tawny chrysanthemums the color of her hair. Sam has grown to be a magnificent fellow and everyone likes him. When I remember what a pale-faced, anxious boy he was once, and see what a strong, capable, independent fellow he has become, I feel tremendously proud, not only of him, but of Lee, which helped him to make himself what he is. There was a time when everybody thought him the son of a thief, and when he was broken-hearted with grief and shame, when he might have gone down and become worse than nothing. But he wanted to be good and fine, and everybody in Lee turned in and gave him a boost. Annie Laurie helped most of all, of course.
Now she has her reward.
They have gone away on a wedding trip, and I am so glad. Never before has either of them gone outside of the state they were born in. But now she and Sam are off to the North, and will visit New York and Boston, Washington and Baltimore, and a number of other places. Fortunately, they have a good superintendent, and the dairy will get on very well without them. I am going to stay in the house with Annie Laurie’s two aunts until she returns. Aunt Adnah is very restless, and Aunt Zillah cannot manage her very well, but when I am there I can, I think, keep them amused. I move over to-morrow, and shall stay in Annie Laurie’s own room, which is as clean, if not as bare, as in the old days when I knew it first.