Then Dian opened the lid of her little organ, and played an evening hymn, while John watched her shining eyes and tender mouth as she offered up for them both a hymnal of praise in their new home. After the last note they both bowed in solemn prayer before the Throne of Grace!
XLII.
HOME, SWEET HOME
The next morning, Diantha began at once with housewifely care to clean and sweep her treasured dwelling. She scrubbed the kitchen floor, already white and new; she polished the shining brass candlesticks; she scoured the new tins, and as she worked she sang with gay abandon. There was song in her heart, and it could not but bubble up to her lips.
These small chores were done all too soon; then she dusted and arranged her modest belongings in the dainty "front room." After everything was carefully "put to rights," she looked with the happy eyes of ownership at the box, a plain, darkly-painted one, which had come clear from New England to Nauvoo, and which held all her husband's belongings. She would go through that, she said to herself, and see if there were any little bits of mending to do, for of course John had no mother to take care of his things.
She found everything folded with as exquisite neatness and care as she herself could have given them, and in the small wooden "till" she discovered many a little treasure. There were his small Bible and Book of Mormon, which he always carried when out on his trips, with a small rubber cup, also one of his traveling necessities. There was a box of needles, pins, and cotton which Dian appropriated gleefully, whispering to her own happy heart that her dear John should never need to put them to use again. She carefully brushed and folded away all the modest stores of clothing, and then she came to a small packet, on the bottom of the trunk, and wrapped up in a paper which was marked "Private."
It never occurred to Dian, for she was not much of a novel-reader, that there was anything mysterious in the packet; she knew her lover husband too well. She laid that out on the stand under the window, for she wanted John, himself, to show her all its contents, and she knew he would.
Ah, the happiness of that morning, for that blessed girl! Who could portray the bliss of her soul! It was a simple thing, the opening of a homely box, filled with homely articles, but they were the precious belongings of the one man in all creation to that girl-wife, and she felt that the little act, simple as it was, represented her taking formal possession of John and all that he could ever own. He was hers now, as perfectly as she was his.
John came in and found her on the floor, still dreaming over her future.
"Well?" he asked.