“I think you’ll find your mother will get you a new dress after all,” comforted Cecily. “Anyway, nobody will notice you because everyone will be looking at the bride. Aunt Olivia will make a lovely bride. Just think how sweet she’ll look in a white silk dress and a floating veil.”
“She says she is going to have the ceremony performed out here in the orchard under her own tree,” said the Story Girl. “Won’t that be romantic? It almost makes me feel like getting married myself.”
“What a way to talk,” rebuked Felicity, “and you only fifteen.”
“Lots of people have been married at fifteen,” laughed the Story Girl. “Lady Jane Gray was.”
“But you are always saying that Valeria H. Montague’s stories are silly and not true to life, so that is no argument,” retorted Felicity, who knew more about cooking than about history, and evidently imagined that the Lady Jane Gray was one of Valeria’s titled heroines.
The wedding was a perennial source of conversation among us in those days; but presently its interest palled for a time in the light of another quite tremendous happening. One Saturday night Peter’s mother called to take him home with her for Sunday. She had been working at Mr. James Frewen’s, and Mr. Frewen was driving her home. We had never seen Peter’s mother before, and we looked at her with discreet curiosity. She was a plump, black-eyed little woman, neat as a pin, but with a rather tired and care-worn face that looked as if it should have been rosy and jolly. Life had been a hard battle for her, and I rather think that her curly-headed little lad was all that had kept heart and spirit in her. Peter went home with her and returned Sunday evening. We were in the orchard sitting around the Pulpit Stone, where we had, according to the custom of the households of King, been learning our golden texts and memory verses for the next Sunday School lesson. Paddy, grown sleek and handsome again, was sitting on the stone itself, washing his jowls.
Peter joined us with a very queer expression on his face. He seemed bursting with some news which he wanted to tell and yet hardly liked to.
“Why are you looking so mysterious, Peter?” demanded the Story Girl.
“What do you think has happened?” asked Peter solemnly.
“What has?”