The dress that Mark had bought
for Patty was the usual charting and unsuitable offering of a man's
spontaneous affection, being of dark violet cloth with a wadded cape
lined with satin. A little brimmed hat of violet velvet tied under her
chin with silk ribbons completed the costume, and before the youthful
bride and groom had left the ancestral door Mrs. Wilson had hung her own
ermine victorine (the envy of all Edgewood) around Patty's neck and put
her ermine willow muff into her new daughter's hands; thus she was as
dazzling a personage, and as improperly dressed for the journey, as she
could well be.

Waitstill, in her plain linsey-woolsey, was entranced with Patty's
beauty and elegance, and the two girls had a few minutes of sisterly
talk, of interchange of radiant hopes and confidences before Mark tore
them apart, their cheeks wet with happy tears.

As the Mason house faded from view, Patty having waved her muff until
the last moment, turned in her seat and said:--

"Mark, dear, do you think your father would care if I spent the
twenty-dollar gold-piece he gave me, for Waitstill? She will be married
in a fortnight, and if my father does not give her the few things she
owns she will go to her husband more ill-provided even than I was. I
have so much, dear Mark, and she so little."

"It's your own wedding-present to use as you wish," Mark answered, "and
it's exactly like you to give it away. Go ahead and spend it if you want
to; I can always earn enough to keep you, without anybody's help!" and
Mark, after cracking the whip vaingloriously, kissed his wife just over
the violet ribbons, and with sleigh-bells jingling they sped over the
snow towards what seemed Paradise to them, the New Hampshire village
where they had been married and where--

So a few days later, Waitstill received a great parcel which relieved
her of many feminine anxieties and she began to shape and cut and stitch
during all the hours she had to herself. They were not many, for every
day she trudged to the Boynton farm and began with youthful enthusiasm
the household tasks that were so soon to be hers by right.

"Don't waste too much time and strength here, my dearest," said Ivory.
"Do you suppose for a moment I shall keep you long on this lonely farm?
I am ready for admission to the Bar or I am fitted to teach in the best
school in New England. Nothing has held me here but my mother, and in
her present condition of mind we can safely take he