Mrs. Sherrard drove off, triumphant. She had got at the whole thing, in spite of Jane Temple.
The wedding preparations went bravely along; carried on chiefly by Judith. Jacqueline had set her heart on a white silk wedding dress, which for a time eclipsed everything else on her horizon. Mrs. Temple declared that it was extravagant, but Judith, by keen persuasion, succeeded in getting the wedding-gown. She made it with her own hands, and across the front she designed a beautiful and intricate embroidery, to be worked by her.
“Judith, you will kill yourself over that wedding-gown,” Mrs. Temple once remarked. “You have drawn such an elaborate design upon it that you will have to work night and day to get it finished.”
“I shall simply have to be a little more industrious than usual,” replied Judith, with the deep flush that now alternated with extreme paleness.
Jacqueline herself was deeply interested in this gown; more so than in any particular of the coming wedding. Judith had marked off for herself a certain task of work each day upon the embroidery of the gown. Every night, when she stopped at the end of her task, it was as if another stone were laid upon her heart. Throckmorton had noticed her industry, and had admired her handiwork, which she proudly showed him.
“But you are getting white and thin over it,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be better that Jacqueline should not have such a beautiful frock, than for you to work yourself ill over it? I have a great mind to speak to Mrs. Temple about it.”
“No, no, pray don’t!” cried Judith, with a kind of breathless eagerness. “It would break my heart not to finish it.”
Throckmorton looked at her closely. She was not given to that kind of talk. But suddenly she began telling him a funny story of Mrs. Sherrard coming over to pump Mrs. Temple about the coming event, and then she laughed and made him laugh too. Walking back home that night, he found himself speculating on this development of fun and merriment in Judith—a thing she had always suppressed and kept in abeyance until lately.
“Certainly she is in better spirits—more like what one can see her natural self is in the last month or two,” he thought; and then he began to think what a very sweet and natural woman she was, and to hope that, when Jacqueline was her age, she would have developed into something like Judith. But he never liked to look very far into the future with Jacqueline.