“Hush, dear; we have enough, only you had better leave it to the waiters, you know.”

“Everybody has taken it that I have passed it to,” said Eddy.  “I have given that gentleman over there four plates heaped up.”

“Oh, hush, Eddy dear!” whispered Charlotte, in an agony.

By this time they were in the hall, and Eddy, still full of grievances, was picking up the scattered roses.  “I suppose there won’t be enough salad for my friend and his mother when they come,” said he, further.

“Who are your friend and his mother, darling?”

“Mr. Anderson and his mother,” declared Eddy, promptly.  “He is the best man in this town, and so is his mother.”

“Mr. Anderson, dear?”

“Yes.  You know who I mean.  You ought to know.  He always lets us have all we want out of his store.  He and his mother are the nicest people in this town except us.”

Charlotte looked at her little brother and her face flushed softly.  “But, dear,” she whispered, “they did not have any invitations to the reception.”

“Yes, they did,” declared Eddy, triumphantly.

“Why, who sent them?”

“I did,” said Eddy.

Charlotte regarded her little brother with a curious expression.  It was amused, and yet strangely puzzled, but more as if the puzzle were in her own mind than elsewhere.  It was as if she were trying to remember something.

“Don’t you think he is a nice man?” asked Eddy, looking sharply at her.

“Yes, dear, I think so.  I don’t know anything to the contrary.”

“Don’t you think he is handsome?”

Suddenly Charlotte saw Anderson’s face in her thoughts for the first time very plainly.  “Yes,” she said, “of course.  Let us go in the other room, Eddy, and see if Amy doesn’t want anything.”  She led Eddy forcibly into the parlor.

“It is so late, I am afraid he won’t come,” the little boy said, disappointedly, when the clock on the mantel struck eleven just as they entered.

It was not long after that when the company began to disperse.  The bride and groom were to take a midnight-train, and the bride and her sister stole away up-stairs for the changing of the bridal for the travelling costume.

Charlotte unfastened her sister’s wedding-gown, and she was striving her best to keep the tears back.  Ina, on the contrary, was gayer than usual.

“It is very odd,” said she, as Charlotte hooked the collar of her gray travelling-gown, “how a girl looks forward to getting married, all her life, and thinks more of it than anything else, and how, after all, it is nothing at all.  You can remember that I said so, Charlotte, when you come to get married.  You needn’t dread it as if it were some tremendous undertaking.  It isn’t, you know.”

“You speak exactly as if you had died, and were telling me not to dread dying,” said Charlotte.  She laughed, and the laugh was almost a sob.