“Dont’ee take on so,” Miss Thoroughbung said to Mrs. Annesley at the last moment.  “He’ll give her plenty to eat and to drink, and will never do her a morsel of harm.”  Joe overheard this, and wished that his aunt was back in her bed at Marmaduke Lodge.

Then the marriage was over, and they all trooped into the vestry to sign the book.  “You can’t get out of that now,” said Mrs. Crabtree to Joe.

“I don’t want to.  I have got the fairest girl in these parts for my wife, and, as I believe, the best young woman.”  This he said with a spirit for which Mrs. Crabtree had not given him credit, and Algy Soames heard him and admired his friend beneath his blue necktie.  And one of the girls heard it, and cried tears of joy as she told her sister afterward in the bedroom.  “Oh, what a darling he is!” Molly had said, amid her own sobbing.  Joe stood an inch higher among them all because of that word.

Then came the breakfast,—­that dullest, saddest hour of all.  To feed heavily about twelve in the morning is always a nuisance,—­a nuisance so abominable that it should be avoided under any other circumstances than a wedding in your own family.  But that wedding-breakfast, when it does come, is the worst of all feeding.  The smart dresses and bare shoulders seen there by daylight, the handing people in and out among the seats, the very nature of the food, made up of chicken and sweets and flummery, the profusion of champagne, not sometimes of the very best on such an occasion; and then the speeches!  They fall generally to the lot of some middle-aged gentlemen, who seem always to have been selected for their incapacity.  But there is a worse trouble yet remaining—­in the unnatural repletion which the sight even of so much food produces, and the fact that your dinner for that day is destroyed utterly and forever.

Mr. Crabtree and the two fathers made the speeches, over and beyond that which was made by Joe himself.  Joe’s father was not eloquent.  He brewed, no doubt, good beer, without a taste in it beyond malt and hops;—­no man in the county brewed better beer; but he couldn’t make a speech.  He got up, dressed in a big white waistcoat, and a face as red as his son’s hunting-coat, and said that he hoped his boy would make a good husband.  All he could say was, that being a lover had not helped to make him a good brewer.  Perhaps when Molly Annesley was brought nearer to Buntingford, Joe mightn’t spend so much of his time in going to and fro.  Perhaps Mr. Joe might not demand so much of her attention.  This was the great point he made, and it was received well by all but the bride, who whispered to Joe that if he thought that he was to be among the brewing tubs from morning till night he’d find he was mistaken.  Mr. Annesley threw a word or two of feeling into his speech, as is usual with the father of the young lady, but nobody seemed to care much for that.  Mr. Crabtree was facetious with the ordinary wedding jests,—­as might have been expected,