Piney and Honey were delighted over this new bond between the two families.
"We will be all cousins by marriage now," Piney said, "and if you girls don't let me be a bridesmaid, too, I'll never pass your portals again."
CHAPTER XXX
FACING REALITY
The wedding was set for the twentieth of September, and the last of the tent colony departed two weeks previously. The boys had gone first of all, and then the art students. The night before they left there had been a moonlight lawn party up at Greenacres, with dancing in a pavilion of young willows built by the boys. Kit declared she had never imagined anything so easy and so striking. With a good floor laid for dancing, they had erected a framework and then tied the willow trees to this on the four sides of the pavilion. Crisscrossing overhead were rows of Japanese lanterns. Old Cady Graves paced up and down playing his violin, as usual, and calling off for the quadrille, in his high pitched rhythmic cadence.
But the biggest surprise of all came when Bryan Ormond, who had stirred the musical circles of two worlds, took his place on the little country platform and played for them on his 'cello. The Judge and Mrs. Ellis enjoyed it just as the Robbinses did. It was a novel treat to hear the strains of Lizst and Chopin sounding in the purple silences of those old country hills, but when he had finished, Cynthy leaned over to Kit, who sat next to her and who was in an uplifted rhapsody of meditation.
"Do you suppose he'd be willing to play 'Home, Sweet Home' on that thing if we asked him to? 'Tain't nothin' but a big fiddle, is it?"
Before Kit could answer, Madame Ormond herself stood facing them on the veranda steps under the big yellow porch light, and instead of any grand-opera aria, her golden voice floated out for them, singing Cynthy's favorite as surely it had never been sung before in Gilead.
After it was all over and the girls were in their own rooms, Kit stepped to Helen's door for an extra match, and found her standing before the mirror, a long green velvet portière draped around her shoulders, and a strip of gold braid banding her hair. She turned around with quick embarrassment, and exclaimed breathlessly: