The little brown house was full of flowers and laughter and coming and going.  Anne and Alix, flushed and excited in their bridesmaids’ gowns, were nervous and tired.  They had made lists and addressed envelopes, had decorated the house, had talked to milliners and florists and caterers and dressmakers, had packed and repacked Cherry’s trunk and boxes.  Cherry was tired and excited, too, but had no realization of it; she was carried along upon a roseate cloud of happiness and excitement.

Martin’s mother and stepfather had come down from Portland, and were friendly, and pleased with everything.

“His mother,” Alix told Peter, “is the sort of handsome person who keeps a boarding-house and marries a rich, adoring old Klondike man.”

“Is that what she did?” Peter whispered, amused.

“She’s only sixteen years older than Martin is!” Alix confided further.  “She kissed Cherry and said, ’You’re just a baby doll, that’s what you are!’ And he calls me ‘Ma’am,’ and Cherry ‘Sister!’ They’ve got two little children, a boy and a girl.  Dad likes them both.”

“Well, that’s good!” Peter approved.  “Does Cherry?”

“Oh, anything that belongs to Martin is perfect!” Alix answered, in indulgent scorn, as she abruptly departed to see to some detail concerning the carriages, the music, or the breakfast.  She and Anne were in a constant state of worry during the morning; their plans for seating two score of persons were changed twenty times; they conspired in agitated whispers behind doors and in the pantry.

But the first wedding went well.  At twelve o’clock Charity Strickland became Charity Lloyd, and was kissed and toasted and congratulated until her lovely little face was burning with colour, and her blue eyes were bewildered with fatigue.  She stood in the drawing-room doorway, her bouquet with its trailing ribbons in her gloved hands, and as each one of all the old friends and neighbours made some little pre-arranged speech of an amusing or emotional nature, she met it with a receptive word or smile, hardly conscious of what she did or said.  Sometimes she freed her feet from the folds of her lacy train, and sometimes gave Martin a glance backward and upward over her shoulder, once asking him to hold her flowers with a smile that several guests afterward remarked showed that those two couldn’t see anything in the world but each other.

At two o’clock there were good-byes.  Cherry had changed the wedding satin for the cream-coloured rajah silk then, and wore the extravagant hat.  It would be many years before she would spend twenty-five dollars for a hat again, and never again would she see bronzed cocks feathers against bronzed straw without remembering the clean little wood-smelling bedroom and the hour in which she had pinned her wedding hat over her fair hair, and had gone, demure and radiant and confident, to meet her husband in the old hallway.