"Late, indeed!" said Aunt Margret, with a toss of her ringlets. "If I couldn't catch up to you folks with your pair of chicks apiece, I shouldn't think it worth while to begin."
The men laughed, and Anna said, "Well, two children would be enough for me if I could only keep them. But that's the worst of having boys--they marry and leave you. A mother can always keep her girls----"
"Until somebody else's boys come and carry them off, and then she sees no more of either," said Aunt Margret.
"That depends on circumstances," said the Governor--"the marriage contract, for example--eh, old friend?"
"Exactly!" said the Factor. "You can generally keep the bull about the place if you have the cow locked up in the cow-house."
The men laughed again, and then the Bishop and the Rector arrived--the Bishop a saintly patriarch with a soft face and a white beard, and the Rector--as became the schoolmaster--sharper, if not more severe.
"I was surprised when I heard it was Magnus," said the Rector. "Oscar has beaten his brother in most things, and I thought he would beat him in getting a wife. And then Thora and he are such friends, too, and so like each other!"
"They get on worst together who are most like each other," said Anna; and Aunt Margret said:
"Stuff! A dark man's a jewel in a fair woman's eye, and what does Thora want with a fair one?"
"But where is Thora?" asked the Bishop.