“Well, not intimately, but Mrs. Ponsonby has been to the house for eggs, and Mrs. Latham’s horse dropped a shoe last week and father set it, and the Vanderveer boy’s pony ran away into our front yard the other day, so I don’t feel as if they were strangers and to be left out.  Oh, Mrs. Evan, if they’d only come and wear some of their fine clothes to light up the church, it would be in the papers, the Bee and the Week’s News over town maybe, and give me such a start!  For you know I’m to live in New York, and as I’ve never left home before, it would be so pleasant to know somebody there!”

I almost made up my mind to try to put things before her in their true light, and save her from disappointment, but then I realized that I was too near her own age.  Ah, if Lavinia Dorman had only been here that day she could possibly have advised Fannie without giving offence.

* * * * *

May 16th. The wedding is over.  Shall I ever forget it?  The rain and cool weather of the past ten days kept back the apple blossoms, so that the supply for decorating the church was poor and the blossoms themselves only half open and water-soaked.  Mrs. Jenks-Smith, who always hears everything, knowing of the dilemma, in the goodness of her heart sent some baskets of hothouse flowers, but the girls and men who were decorating did not know how to handle them effectively, for Fannie, still clinging to sentiment, had gilded nearly a barrel of old horseshoes, which were tied with white ribbon to every available place, being especially prominent on the doors of the reserved pews.

Late in the afternoon a fine mist set in with clouds of fog, which, if it got into the church, I knew would completely conceal the glimmer of the oil lamps.  It seems that Papa Penney was not told until an hour before the ceremony that he was to walk up the aisle with the bride on his arm and give her away.  This he flatly refused to do.  He considered it enough of an affliction to have the wedding in church at all, and it was not until his wife had given her first exhibition of fainting, and Fannie had cried her eyes red, that he apparently yielded.

We arrived at the church at about ten minutes to eight, father and Evan having been persuaded to come in recognition of good neighbourhood feeling.  The back part of the church was well filled, but the space above the ribbon was painfully empty.  The glimmering lamps did little more than reveal the gloom, and the horseshoes gave a strange racing-stable effect.

We tried to spread ourselves out as much as possible to fill up, and presently the Ponsonby girls entered with some friends, seemingly astonished at being seated within the barrier, for they had never seen their cards of invitation, and had come as a sort of lark to kill time on a wet evening.

The ushers wandered dismally up and down, stretching their hands nervously as if unused to gloves.  Presently they fell back, and the organ, in the hands of an amateur performer and an inadequate blower, began to chirp and hoot merrily, by which we knew the bridal party was about to appear.