“Not very long, Philip. You have been through enough, and I’ll try to make you forget the sad things in being happy with me. Mother will not want to keep us apart. I’ve just been so pleased to see how she fusses over you since you came home, almost as much as she does over Dick.”
The older girls in the family connection did not expect to be bridesmaids for this wedding. Cathalina had worried about it a little at first, although Nan was the only one who was of her own age. She loved the older girls, but did want her “butterfly girls,” as she sometimes called the girls of the Psyche Club. And after Cathalina learned through Aunt Katherine and Louise Van Ness that Ann Maria would be married some time in the summer or fall to a young officer, she knew that Louise and Emily and the other girls in Ann Maria’s circle of friends would be bridesmaids for her.
June came and brought the “butterfly girls” to New York. Leaving before Commencement permitted them to arrive about the close of the first week in June, and ten days before the wedding. The pretty bridesmaid gowns were carefully boxed and came through in good condition. Cathalina’s and Mrs. Van Buskirk’s maids unpacked for the girls and put their clothes in drawers and closets. Hilary and Betty were in the rose room, Eloise and Helen near, Isabel in a small room, to sleep by herself in the few hours which they spent in that occupation, though Mrs. Van Buskirk came around herself to see that they did not talk too late, reminding them that they must keep in fine condition for the great event.
There was so much to talk about! Nearly a year, and a strange year, had some of them been separated Cathalina waited till all the girls had arrived and then showed them her pretty trousseau. “Dainty and lovely, like you, Cathalina,” said Isabel.
“I haven’t had anything packed yet, because I wanted you all to see everything,” said Cathalina, “but the maid is going to begin as soon as Mother and I select what I shall want with me. We are going to Canada for our wedding trip, not much of a trip, just to get there and stay in a perfectly beautiful country place. We shall be there a month and then may join the folks at the seashore. It’s all beautifully indefinite, and Allan and I don’t care where we are just so we are together.”
“‘Allan,’—Captain Van Horne! I was going to ask you, Cathalina, if you called him by his first name.”
Cathalina laughed. “He doesn’t seem so old to me now as when he was an instructor at Grant. He’s a good deal of a boy, now that he is happy and does not have to worry about law school and making a living and all that. He works too hard, of course, I suppose he always will, but he has such a fine opportunity now that he need not worry. We are not going to begin on any large scale of living. Just think, girls, what if I had never learned anything but just being waited on and wanting everything. We are going to get a darling little apartment as soon as we come back and start in that. Mother mourns a little and says, ‘Think of this big house and nobody but your father and me pretty soon!’ But I think that Father admires both Allan and Phil for wanting to be independent. If the presents keep coming at the rate they are, a little apartment will not hold them all. However, I can store them here.”
“When did it happen, Cathalina?” asked Isabel.
“Getting engaged, you mean?”
Isabel nodded. “I do not mean to be inquisitive, but we thought that you did not hear from him very often,—and so I just wondered when.”