While they sat there too much absorbed in each other to heed the lapse of time, or hear first the bell, and then the tin horn, which Aunt Jerry in her impatience had used alternately as a reminder of dinner, that worthy spinster herself suddenly appeared before them, her brow clouded, and her mouth puckered up in the peculiar fashion which Edna knew was indicative of displeasure.
Aunt Jerry’s first act after Roy had left the house in quest of Edna, was to unhitch the check-rein of the horse standing at the gate, and her second to give it water and handfuls of the tall grass growing near. Kindness to brutes was a part of her nature, and nothing which had life was ever in danger of being ill-used where she was, unless it were a child. For children she had not a great deal of love; but where animals were concerned she was a second Bergh, and she cared for Roy’s horse and patted its neck, and when she saw how high it threw its head at first, and how it shrank from her, she said:
“Poor critter! I know by the way you act that your keeper abuses you. No horse kindly used is ever as nervous as that. The wretch! I wish I had him by the nape of the neck!”
When the horse was cared for, the dame, with thoughts intent on dinner, pounced upon a group of fowls feeding at her back-door, and catching the youngest, fattest one, had its neck off in a trice, and picked, and dressed, and had it in the pot within an hour after. Aunt Jerry’s forte in cookery was pot-pie, and she now did her best, and made such a crust, as, to use a common culinary phrase, would almost “melt in one’s mouth.” White and light, and flaky, it looked like bats of cotton wool, and her spirits rose proportionably as she arranged her table and prepared her vegetables.
Everything was done at last. The baked tomatoes were browned just right; the corn pudding was white, and creamy, and sweet; the custard was delicious, and the coffee sent a fragrant odor through the house; but the guests did not come. She had rung the bell, and blown the horn, and at last, as the clock struck one, she started herself for the delinquents, exclaiming when she saw them, “Well, you are smart!” but ere she got farther, Roy arose, and taking Edna’s hand in his, said to her:
“I have found her, you see, and she has promised to live with me always. She is to be my wife, if you do not object.”
“Umph! a pretty time of day to ask if I object, after it’s all cut and dried, and dinner spoiling in the oven. Didn’t you hear the bell, nor the horn I blew an hour ago?”
Both culprits pleaded guilty, and both made haste to follow Miss Jerusha, who never spoke again until the house was reached, and contrary to her prediction, she found that the pot-pie was not spoiled, though she insisted that it would have been better half an hour before.
By the time dinner was over, Aunt Jerry was completely mollified, and after her dishes were washed and put away, and her floor swept, and the cat fed, and the horse watered again, she was ready to hear Roy on the subject uppermost in his mind. He loved Edna; he wanted her for his wife; and wanted to know if Miss Pepper had any objections to the match.
“It’s most too late to give them, if I have,” Aunt Jerry said. “But that’s the way nowadays. Young folks have got the whip row of us, and will keep it, I suppose. No, I have no objections. If she must marry, and I suppose she must, I’d as soon she’d have you as anybody, and she won’t go to you poverty-stricken either. Every dollar she paid me, I put in Beals’s bank, in her name, and added another to it, so that she has now as good as a thousand laid up. I shall give her another thousand, too, and a feather bed, and I want it secured to her and her heirs forever.”