“It’s to be to-night and I’ve missed my train at the Junction already, and I don’t know what to do. Everybody was invited and the supper won’t keep, and I lost my solid silver hatpin, anyway.”
“Can’t you come out and walk with me?” suggested Alice. “The air will make you feel better. Bathe your eyes and come.”
Still tearful, but manifestly a little relieved, the bride obeyed and, once out on the prairie, poured forth her tale. She had at the last moment decided she could not bear to be married without a veil, and had gone early in the morning to the nearest town to invest her last money in that frivolity. Fate was against her, however, for there were no veils in the shops, and a persuasive milliner had induced her to give up her cherished notion and buy a hat instead. “And I’m most sure the ribbon’s cotton-back,” she sighed. “I don’t know why I bought it, anyway. That’s always the way with me. I think I know what I’ll get, and then they 207 coax me into getting something different. Once I went down town to buy me a pair of black stockings, and I got an Alice blue silk waist, instead. Stephen he thinks it’s funny and he says he’ll see to the shopping when we’re married. I wisht he’d come to-day.”
“Wouldn’t it be fun if he had?” said Alice. “There is a minister on the train, and we could have had a lovely wedding out here!”
This romantic idea cheered them both for a time, but its power was brief. There were signs of a tear-shower imminent, and Alice was at her wits’ end for devices to adjust that garment of praise to fit.
Then came a great inspiration. “Let’s walk to the Junction,” she exclaimed. “I’ll go with you, and you can get a team there, and drive home.”
“But you’d miss your train.”
“O, no, I wouldn’t. It has to come right along there behind us, and I could jump on the cow-catcher if it came; but it can’t come without an engine, and there isn’t one in sight, and it’s only two miles to your Junction, you say. That won’t be anything of a walk. Go and get your hat-box.”
The hat-box was not all. Though the journey was to be only a short one, the bride had taken a satchel with her of a type Alice especially loathed. This was a trifle, however, to a spirit so bent on adventure, and Alice seized the “grip” and started off at a brisk pace.
208“I can’t walk so fast,” said the bride fretfully. “My shoes hurt.”