e will says; and I think it pleases me as much as
having the money. That frightens me a little, it seems so much. At first
I did not like to take it, and felt as if I might be robbing some one
else; but papa says that she had no very near relations, and that I need
not hesitate. Oh, my darling Clover, is it not wonderful? Now Lion and
I need not wait two years, unless _he_ prefers it, and can just go on
and make our plans happily to suit ourselves and all of you,--and I
shall love to think that we owe it all to dear Mamma Marian; only it
will be a sore spot always that she never got the letter telling of our
engagement. It came just after she died, and they returned it to me.

"Ned has his orders at last. He goes to sea in April, and Katy writes to
papa that she will come and spend a year with him if he likes, while Ned
is away. But papa won't be here. He has quite decided, I think, to leave
Burnet and make his home for the future with us in the High Valley.
Three different physicians have already offered to buy out his practice,
and it is arranged that Dorry shall rent the old house of him, and the
furniture too, except the books and a few special things which papa
wishes to keep. He is going to write to you about the building of what
he is pleased to call 'a separate shanty;' but please don't let the
shanty be really separate; he must be in with all of us somehow, or we
shall never be satisfied. Did Lionel decide to move the Hutlet? Of
course Katy will spend her year in the Valley instead of Burnet. I am
beginning to get my little trousseau together, and have set up a
'wedding bureau' to put the things in; but it is no fun at all without
any sisters at home to help and sympathize. I am the only one who has
had to get ready to be married all by herself. If Katy were not coming
in two months I should be quite desperate. The chief thing on my mind is
how to arrange about the two weddings with the family so scattered as it
is."

This difficulty was settled by Clover a little later. Both the weddings
she proposed should take place in the Valley.

"It is a case of Mahomet and mountain," she wrote. "Look at it
dispassionately. You and papa and Katy and Dorry have got to come out
here any way,--the rest of us _are_ here; and it is clearly impossible
that all of us should go on to Burnet to see you married,--though if
you persist some of us will, inconvenient and expensive as it would be.
But just consider what a picturesque