“Mine is from Louisa Agnew,—­quite a long one, too.  It’s an age since we heard from her, you know.”

    ASHBURN, April 24.

DEAR KATY,—­Your delightful letter and invitation came day before yesterday, and thank you for both.  There is nothing in the world that would please me better than to come to your wedding if it were possible, but it simply isn’t.  If you lived in New Haven now, or even Boston,—­but Burnet is so dreadfully far off, it seems as inaccessible as Kamchatka to a person who, like myself, has a house to keep and two babies to take care of.

Don’t look so alarmed.  The house is the same house you saw when you were here, and so is one of the babies; the other is a new acquisition just two years old, and as great a darling as Daisy was at the same age.  My mother has been really better in health since he came, but just now she is at a sort of Rest Cure in Kentucky; and I have my hands full with papa and the children, as you can imagine, so I can’t go off two days’ journey to a wedding,—­not even to yours, my dearest old Katy.  I shall think about you all day long on the day, when I know which it is, and try to imagine just how everything looks; and yet I don’t find that quite easy, for somehow I fancy that your wedding will be a little different from the common run.  You always were different from other people to me, you know,—­you and Clover,—­and I love you so much, and I always shall.

Papa has taken a kit-kat portrait of me in oils,—­and a blue dress,—­which he thinks is like, and which I am going to send you as soon as it comes home from the framers.  I hope you will like it a little for my sake.  Dear Katy, I send so much love with it.

I have only seen the Pages in the street since they came home from Europe; but the last piece of news here is Lilly’s engagement to Comte Ernest de Conflans.  He has something to do with the French legation in Washington, I believe; and they crossed in the same steamer.  I saw him driving with her the other day,—­a little man, not handsome, and very dark.  I do not know when they are to be married.  Your Cousin Clarence is in Colorado.

With two kisses apiece and a great hug for you, Katy, I am
always

Your affectionate friend,
LOUISA.

“Dear me!” said the insatiable Clover, “is that the very last?  I wish we had another mail, and twelve more letters coming in at once.  What a blessed institution the post-office is!”

CHAPTER III.

THE FIRST WEDDING IN THE FAMILY.

The great job of the cake-making over, a sense of leisure settled on the house.  There seemed nothing left to be done which need put any one out of his or her way particularly.  Katy had among her other qualities a great deal of what is called “forehandedness.”  To leave things to be attended to at the last moment in a flurry and a hurry would have been intolerable to her.  She firmly believed in the doctrine of a certain wise man of our own day who says that to push your work before you is easy enough, but to pull it after you is very hard indeed.