“Shall you?” queried Clover, softly.

“Why, of course!  Doesn’t it seem too sweet?  Both our mothers!”

“There!” cried Amy, “you are going to cry too, Tanta!  I thought weddings were nice funny things.  I never supposed they made people feel badly.  I sha’n’t ever let Mabel get married, I think.  But she’ll have to stay a little girl always in that case, for I certainly won’t have her an old maid.”

“What do you know about old maids, midget?” asked Clover.

“Why, Miss Clover, I have seen lots of them.  There was that one at the Pension Suisse; you remember, Tanta?  And the two on the steamer when we came home.  And there’s Miss Fitz who made my blue frock; Ellen said she was a regular old maid.  I never mean to let Mabel be like that.”

“I don’t think there’s the least danger,” remarked Katy, glancing at the inseparable Mabel, who was perched on Amy’s arm, and who did not look a day older than she had done eighteen months previously.  “Amy, we’re going to make wedding-cake next week,—­heaps and heaps of wedding-cake.  Don’t you want to come and help?”

“Why, of course I do.  What fun!  Which day may I come?”

The cake-making did really turn out fun.  Many hands made light work of what would have been a formidable job for one or two.  It was all done gradually.  Johnnie cut the golden citron quarters into thin transparent slices in the sitting-room one morning while the others were sewing, and reading Tennyson aloud.  Elsie and Amy made a regular frolic of the currant-washing.  Katy, with Debby’s assistance, weighed and measured; and the mixture was enthusiastically stirred by Alexander, with the “spade” which he had invented, in a large new wash-tub.  Then came the baking, which for two days filled the house with spicy, plum-puddingy odors; then the great feat of icing the big square loaves; and then the cutting up, in which all took part.  There was much careful measurement that the slices might be an exact fit; and the kitchen rang with bright laughter and chat as Katy and Clover wielded the sharp bread-knives, and the others fitted the portions into their boxes, and tied the ribbons in crisp little bows.  Many delicious crumbs and odd corners and fragments fell to the share of the younger workers; and altogether the occasion struck Amy as so enjoyable that she announced—­with her mouth full—­that she had changed her mind, and that Mabel might get married as often as she pleased, if she would have cake like that every time,—­a liberality of permission which Mabel listened to with her invariable waxen smile.

When all was over, and the last ribbons tied, the hundreds of little boxes were stacked in careful piles on a shelf of the inner closet of the doctor’s office to wait till they were wanted,—­an arrangement which naughty Clover pronounced eminently suitable, since there should always be a doctor close at hand where there was so much wedding-cake.  But before all this was accomplished, came what Katy, in imitation of one of Miss Edgeworth’s heroines, called “The Day of Happy Letters.”