Hilary Vireo would not have dared to lead to perjury, by such words, a common man and woman.  It was enough for such to ask if they would take, and keep to, each other.

Mrs. Megilp thought it was “so jumbled!” “If it was her daughter, she should not think she was half married.”

Mrs. Megilp put it more shrewdly than she had intended.

Desire and Christopher Kirkbright were very sure they had not been “half married.”  It was not the world’s half marriage that they had stood up there together for.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

KITCHEN CRAMBO.

Elise Mokey and Mary Pinfall came in one evening to see Bel Bree and Kate.

There had been company to tea up-stairs, and the dishes were more than usual, and the hour was a little later.

Kate was putting up the last of the cooking utensils, and scalding down the big tin dish-pan and the sink.  Bel was up-stairs.

A table with a fresh brown linen cloth upon it, two white plates and cups, and two white napkins, stood out on the kitchen floor under the gas-light.  The dumb-waiter came rumbling down, with toast dish, tea and coffee pots, oyster dish and muffin plate.  Several slices of cream toast were left, and there was a generous remnant of nicely browned scalloped oysters.  The half muffins, buttered hot, looked tender and tempting still.

Kate removed the dishes, sent up the waiter, and producing some nice little stone-ware nappies hot from the hot closet, transferred the food from the china to these, laying it neatly together, and replaced them in the closet, to wait till Bel should come.  The tea and coffee she poured into small white pitchers, also hot in readiness, and set them on the range corner.  Then she washed the porcelain and silver in fresh-drawn scalding water, wiped and set them safely on the long, white sideboard.  There they gleamed in the gas-light, and lent their beauty to the brightness of the room, just as much as they would have done in actual using.

“But what a lot of trouble!” said Elise Mokey.

“Half a dozen dishes?” returned Kate.  “Just three minutes’ work; and a warm, fresh supper to make it worth while.  Besides rubbing the silver once in four weeks, instead of every Friday.  A Yankee kitchen is a labor-saving institution, Mrs. Scherman says.”

Down came the waiter again, and down the stairs came Bel.  Kate brought two more cups and plates and napkins.

“Now, girls, come and take some tea,” she said, drawing up the chairs.

Mrs. Scherman was not strict about “kitchen company.”  She gave the girls freely to understand that a friend or two happening in now and then to see them, were as welcome to their down-stairs table as her own happeners in were to hers.  “I know it is just the cosiness and the worth-while of home and living,” she said.  “And I’ll trust the ‘now and then’ of it to you.”