“And you know how I always felt, so long as any of my family were left—that my first duty was with them.”
“Yes,” repeated Miss Cockerill.
“Well, when Jonas came on this time, so soon after mother’s death, he found me all upset. It was the change, I s’pose, and the loneliness, and the having no one to look out for. And when he spoke of taking me away I just couldn’t go. So we arranged that he should come here instead. And I can’t help being glad it was so. It isn’t so hard for him, as ’twould be for me to go ’way out where he lives.”
“Where he lived,” suggested Miss Cockerill.
Mrs. Lane accepted the amendment with a smile.
“And when we came to talk things over we decided we didn’t want any publicity—and I just in mourning, you know.” Mrs. Lane noted that this point told. “We didn’t know just how to manage, though. Jonas, he was for going before the justice. But I told him as how I wouldn’t feel right if I wasn’t married by a minister. Then he wanted we should go off somewheres and get married before a strange minister, so as nobody should know till it was all over. Eloping, he called it, like a story book. But I told him I wouldn’t have any goings on like novels, and that if I couldn’t be married by my own minister I wouldn’t be married at all.”
“Dear me!” cried Miss Cockerill. “After all the time he’s waited! I thought you told him something, though, from the way he left the house the day he came back. I said as much to Mis’ Webster. She was with me at the time.”
“Is that so? ’Twas Mrs. Webster that finally fixed it up with Jonas. It simply used me up, and he told me to leave it to him and he’d get us married by the minister without any fuss and feathers—or rice,” she added.
“How did they do it?” inquired Miss Cockerill.
“Well, I invited the minister and his wife and Jonas in to dinner,” answered the bride. “I naturally would have had you, Susan, if I’d had anybody outside. But Mrs. Webster had to know about it, being the minister’s wife, and she was really the one that managed, and as long as ’twas that way it seemed a comfort to have some other woman there. I felt awful mean, though, not telling you, Susan.”