to carry
round canted all to one side over her shoulder," said Aunt Oldways,
looking after them down the dusty road the morning that he went
away. Laura, in her white dress and her straw hat and her silly
little bronze-and-blue-silk slippers printing the roadside gravel,
leaning on Grant Ledwith's arm, seemed only to have gained a fresh,
graceful adjunct to set off her own pretty goings and comings with,
and to heighten the outside interest of that little point of
eternity that she called her life. Mr. Ledwith was not so much a man
who had won a woman, as Laura was a girl who had "got a beau."

She had sixteen tucked and trimmed white skirts, too, she told
Frank; she should have eight more before she was married; people
wore ever so many skirts now, at a time. She had been to a party a
little while ago where she wore _seven_.

There were deep French embroidery bands around some of these white
skirts; those were beautiful for morning dresses. Geraldine Oferr
was married last winter; Laura had been her bridesmaid; Gerry had a
white brocade from Paris, and a point-lace veil. She had three dozen
of everything, right through. They had gone to housekeeping up town,
in West Sixteenth Street. Frank would have to come to New York next
winter, or in the spring, to be _her_ bridesmaid; then she would
see; then--who knew!

Frank was only sixteen, and she lived away up here in Homesworth
among the hills; she had not "seen," but she had her own little
secret, for all that; something she neither told nor thought, yet
which was there; and it came across her with a queer little thrill
from the hidden, unlooked-at place below thought, that "Who"
_didn't_ know.

Laura waited a year for Grant Ledwith's salary to be raised to
marrying point; he was in a wholesale woolen house in Boston; he was
a handsome fellow, with gentlemanly and taking address,--capital,
this, for a young salesman; and they put his pay up to two thousand
dollars within that twelvemonth. Upon this, in the spring, they
married; took a house in Filbert Street, down by the river, and set
up their little gods. These were: a sprinkle of black walnut and
brocatelle in the drawing-room, a Sheffield-plate tea-service, and a
crimson-and-giltedged dinner set that Mrs. Oferr gave them; twilled
turkey-red curtains, that looked like thibet, in the best chamber;
and the twenty-four white skirts and the silk dresses, and whatever
corresponded to them on the bride-groom's part, in