door. "The busier you keep, the shorter the
time will seem."

The week went by at last. To the young man, one of a large family long
since scattered--many members of it, including both father and mother,
in the old Virginia churchyard--the time could not come too soon. He had
lived alone with his housekeeper almost four years now, and during
nearly all that time he had been waiting for Charlotte.

She was considerably younger than he, and when he had been, after two
years of acquaintance, allowed to betroth himself to her, he had been
asked to wait yet another two years while she should "grow up a little
more," as her wise father put it.

As for Charlotte herself, she still seemed to those who loved her at
home hardly grown up enough at twenty-two to go to a home of her own.

Yet father and mother, brothers and sister, were all ready to
acknowledge that those two years had resulted in the early budding of
very sweet and womanly qualities; and nobody, watching Charlotte with
her lover, could possibly fear for either that they were not ready for
the great experiment.

The autumn leaves were bright, the white fall anemones were in blossom,
when Charlotte's wedding-day came; and with leaves and anemones the
little stone church was decorated.

Not an invitation of the customary sort had been sent out. But, as is
usual in a comfortable, un-aristocratic suburb, the news that Doctor
Churchill and Miss Charlotte Birch wanted everybody who knew and cared
for them to come to the church and see them married had spread until all
understood.

The result was that no one of Doctor Churchill's patients--and he had
won a large and growing practice among all classes of people--felt left
out or forgotten, and that, as the clock struck the hour of noon, the
church was crowded to the doors with those who were real friends of the
young people.

"Somehow I don't feel a bit like a bride," said Charlotte, looking,
however, very much like one, as she stood in the centre of her mother's
room in bridal array.

Four elegant male figures, two in frock coats, two in more youthful but
equally festive attire, were surveying her with satisfaction.

Near by hovered Celia, the daintiest of maids of honour: Mrs. Birch, as
charming as a girl herself in her pale gray silken gown: and little
Ellen Donohue, a six-year-old protegee of the family, her hazel eyes
wide with gazing at Charlotte, whom she hugged intermittently and adored
without cessatio