didn't long, for the next summer he
was dead sure enough, and Mrs. Gaines put on the longest crepe veil ever
seen in the South, she said. It touched the hem of her skirt in front
and behind; but she cut it in half after everybody had seen it often
enough to know how long it was.

If Augustus Gaines thought she was going to ruin her eyes and choke her
lungs by wearing unhealthy crepe over her face he thought wrong, she
said, and in a few months it was gone and she was as gay as a girl.
She's what they call a character, Mrs. Gaines is.

I don't want to be like her, and I don't expect to do any groaning over
leaving Yorkburg. I want to live with Uncle Parke and Miss Katherine,
and I'm going to. But it's strange how many happy things hurt.

XV

A REAL WEDDING

It looks as if everybody who knows Miss Katherine wants her to be
married from their house. Her brothers want her to be married from
theirs. Her aunt, Mrs. Powhatan Bloodgood, who lives in Loudon County,
and whose husband is as rich as a real lord, begs her to be married in
hers; and everybody in Yorkburg--I mean the coat-of-arms
everybodies--has invited her to have the wedding in their home.

But she just smiles and says no to them all. Says she is going to be
married from her house, which is the Orphan Asylum, though the ceremony
will be at the church. It's going to be in the morning at twelve
o'clock, so they can take the two-o'clock train for Richmond and go on
to New York.

Miss Katherine wants it to be quiet, but it can't be quiet. There's
nothing on human legs that can use them who won't be at the church to
see that wedding take place.

Everybody has been paying her a lot of attention of late. It's real
strange what a difference a man makes in a marriage, even if he isn't
noticed much in person at the time. If he's rich and prominent,
everybody is so pleasant and sociable you'd think they were real
intimate. If he's just good and poor, few take notice.

When Miss Vickie Toones married Mr. Joe Blake they didn't get hardly any
presents. They had a lot of dead relations who used to be rich and
haughty, but their living ones are as poor as the people they didn't
used to know, and hardly anybody gave them anything handsome.

Miss Katherine's presents are just amazing, and my eyes are blistered by
the shine of them. I didn't know before such things were in the world.
People say Uncle Parke has made a lot of money in some mines out West,
besides