“There will be about sixty guests, all told,” she said, as if she were thinking of nothing else.  “We must move the furniture out of this room and set the supper-table here.  The dining-room is too small.  We must borrow Mrs. Bell’s forks and spoons.  She offered to lend them.  I’d never have been willing to ask her.  The damask table cloths with the ribbon pattern must be bleached to-morrow.  Nobody else in Avonlea has such tablecloths.  And we’ll put the little dining-room table on the hall landing, upstairs, for the presents.”

Rachel was not thinking about the presents, or the housewifely details of the wedding.  Her breath was coming quicker, and the faint blush on her smooth cheeks had deepened to crimson.  She knew that a critical moment was approaching.  With a steady hand she wrote the last name on her list and drew a line under it.

“Well, have you finished?” asked her mother impatiently.  “Hand it here and let me look over it to make sure that you haven’t left anybody out that should be in.”

Rachel passed the paper across the table in silence.  The room seemed to her to have grown very still.  She could hear the flies buzzing on the panes, the soft purr of the wind about the low eaves and through the apple boughs, the jerky beating of her own heart.  She felt frightened and nervous, but resolute.

Mrs. Spencer glanced down the list, murmuring the names aloud and nodding approval at each.  But when she came to the last name, she did not utter it.  She cast a black glance at Rachel, and a spark leaped up in the depths of the pale eyes.  On her face were anger, amazement, incredulity, the last predominating.

The final name on the list of wedding guests was the name of David Spencer.  David Spencer lived alone in a little cottage down at the Cove.  He was a combination of sailor and fisherman.  He was also Isabella Spencer’s husband and Rachel’s father.

“Rachel Spencer, have you taken leave of your senses?  What do you mean by such nonsense as this?”

“I simply mean that I am going to invite my father to my wedding,” answered Rachel quietly.

“Not in my house,” cried Mrs. Spencer, her lips as white as if her fiery tone had scathed them.

Rachel leaned forward, folded her large, capable hands deliberately on the table, and gazed unflinchingly into her mother’s bitter face.  Her fright and nervousness were gone.  Now that the conflict was actually on she found herself rather enjoying it.  She wondered a little at herself, and thought that she must be wicked.  She was not given to self-analysis, or she might have concluded that it was the sudden assertion of her own personality, so long dominated by her mother’s, which she was finding so agreeable.

“Then there will be no wedding, mother,” she said.  “Frank and I will simply go to the manse, be married, and go home.  If I cannot invite my father to see me married, no one else shall be invited.”