Instead of stopping with the others for the wedding feast at the Solomon’s cottage, Sarah pleaded a sudden palpitation of the heart, and hurried home to put the house in order before the arrival of the bride.  Already she had prepared the best chamber and set the supper table with her blue and white china, but as she walked quietly home from church at the side of old Adam, she had remembered, with a sensation of panic, that she had forgotten to make up the the feather bed, which she rolled over for an airing.  Not a speck of dust was left on the floor or windows, and a little later, while she began spreading the sheets, without waiting to remove her bonnet, she thought proudly that Judy probably never stayed in so entirely respectable a chamber in her life.  Even the pitcher and basin were elaborately ornamented with peonies, the colour of the sampler in crewel work over the washstand; and on the bureau, between two crocheted mats of an intricate pattern, there was a pincushion in the shape of a monstrous tomato.

Yes, it was all ready for them, she reflected, while she stood in the doorway and surveyed the results of her handiwork.  “Thar’s something wantin’,” she observed presently to herself.  “I never could feel that a weddin’ or a funeral was finished without a calla lily somewhere around.”  Going downstairs to the kitchen, she clipped the last forced blossoms of an unusual size from her “prize” plant, and brought them back in a small glass vase to decorate Judy’s bureau.  “Now it’s just like it was when I was married,” she thought, “an’ it’s just as it will be when Abel’s sons are bringin’ home their brides.”  There was no sentiment in her thoughts, for she regarded sentiment as a mere morbid stimulant to the kind of emotion she considered both dangerous and useless.  Even the look on Abel’s face, which she had been forced to recognize as that of despair, seemed to her, on the whole, a safer expression than one of a too-exultant joy.  She was not afraid of despair—­its manifestations were familiar to her, and she had usually found them amenable to the laws of propriety.  But she felt vaguely that happiness in some mysterious way was related to sin, and the shameless ecstasy with which Abel had announced his engagement to Molly had branded his emotion as positively immoral in her sight.  “No decent feelin’ is goin’ to make anybody’s face shine like a brass plate,” she had said to herself.

After straightening the crocheted mats for the last time, she went downstairs to the kitchen to describe the wedding to the two old people, who, chained to their chairs by rheumatism, were on the point of bursting with curiosity.

“An’ you didn’t bring me so much as a bite of cake,” whimpered grandmother, seeing her empty hands.  “Here I’ve been settin’ all day in this cheer with my mouth waterin’ for that weddin’ cake.”

“I’m just as sure as I can be that Mrs. Hatch is goin’ to send you some made by Blossom,” replied Sarah soothingly.