"I have devised a charming plan," said Mrs. Mayfield. "We'll all be married up there on the top of the hill among the vines. Won't that be romantic? No church, no hot house flowers, but blossoms still alive, with humming birds sipping their honey. We'll make of it a marriage May day, to be lived over in after years; and we'll have a picture painted of the scene, nature's altar; and in the twilight of many a summer's day we'll muse over it, growing old."
"Auntie, I accept your romance now," Tom replied. "You have infected us all and make us almost unnatural with happiness."
"But now we'd better go to the house," Jim suggested. "It is about time for the preacher to come and we don't want to keep him waiting. Ma'm, I—"
"Are you calling me ma'm, again?"
"It was to remind myself of a time when I wasn't so happy and to make myself doubly happy now by the reminder."
Coupling off and hand in hand they walked toward the house, ceremonious beyond naturalness in acting out the spirit summoned by a woman steeped in the essences of high-flown books. "The trumpet," she said when they heard Margaret's dinner horn, and not even Tom, who could have recalled many a rakish bout of a Saturday night and many an unholy laugh in church of a Sunday, dared to smile at her. "You've caught me all right, auntie, and I'm strutting like a bantam cock in the spring of the year."
"But don't destroy it all by saying so," she replied, pressing close to Jim and peering round into his face.
Jasper and Margaret were waiting for them, at the table; and again Margaret was never so surprised as when she heard that they were at that moment expecting the arrival of the preacher. She did not quite approve of the hill-top marriage plan. Better would it have suited her purpose to parade the double wedding at Dry Fork, to shine in the presence of neighbors. But Jasper, expecting trouble, was in favor of the speediest method. "Miz Mayfield is the manager of the whole affair," said he. "Ma'm, have some of these here snap beans, b'iled with as brown a piece of bacon as you ever seed. What, Margaret, ain't a cryin'?"
"Of course a man would never cry on an occasion of this here sort," she whimpered. "You don't stop to think that our daughter is a goin' to leave us—it don't seem to make no diffunce to you."
"Wall, not as much diffunce as if she had loved him an' he hadn't loved her. Jim, I reckon here's about as fine a piece of co'n bread as you ever smacked yo' mouth on, white meal ground slow."