“What in creation did she send them old teaspoons and that old sofa for?” his mother asked, disgustedly.

“I don’t know,” replied William, soberly; “but I do know one thing:  I hated to take them bad enough.  She acted all upset over it.  I think she’d better have kept her sofa and teaspoons as long as she lived.”

“Course she was upset givin’ away anything,” scolded his mother.  “It was jest like her, givin’ away a passel of old truck ruther than spend any money.  Well, I s’pose you may as well set that sofa in the parlor.  It ain’t hurt much, anyway.”

Rose and her husband were to live with her parents for the present.  She was married that evening.  She wore a blue silk dress, and some rose-geranium blossoms and leaves in her hair.  Tommy Ray sat by her side on Sylvia’s sofa until the company and the minister were all there.  Then they stood up and were married.

Sylvia came to the wedding in her best silk gown; she had trembled lest Richard Alger should be there, but he had not been invited.  Hannah Berry cherished a deep resentment against him.

“I ain’t goin’ to have any man that’s treated one of my folks as mean as he has set foot in my house to a weddin’, not if I know it,” she told Rose.

After the marriage-cake and cider were passed around, the old people sat solemnly around the borders of the rooms, and the young people played games.  William and his wife were not there.  Hannah had not dared to slight them, but William could not prevail upon Rebecca to go.

Barney, also, had not been invited to the wedding.  Mrs. Berry had an open grudge against him on her niece’s account, and a covert one on her daughter’s.  Hannah Berry had a species of loyalty in her nature, inasmuch as she would tolerate ill-treatment of her kin from nobody but her own self.

Charlotte Barnard came with her father and mother, and sat quietly with them all the evening.  She was beginning insensibly to rather hold herself aloof from the young people, and avoid joining in their games.  She felt older.  People had wondered if she would not wear the dress she had had made for her own wedding, but she did not.  She wore her old purple silk, which had been made over from one of her mother’s, and a freshly-starched muslin collar.  The air was full of the rich sweetness of cake; there was a loud discord of laughter and high shrill voices, through which yet ran a subtle harmony of mirth.  Laughing faces nodded and uplifted like flowers in the merry romping throngs in the middle of the room, while the sober ones against the walls watched with grave, elderly, retrospective eyes.

As soon as she could, Sylvia Crane stole into her sister’s bedroom, where the women’s outside garments were heaped high on the bed, got her own, opened the side door softly, and went home.  The next day she was going to the poor-house, and nobody but the three selectmen of Pembroke knew it.  She had begged them, almost on her knees, to tell nobody until she was there.