such thing. I'm going down right now to buy that there
cook stove."

So that was settled and a new home peaceably, respectably started as
every home should be. And it would have been hard to say who was the
busiest and happiest of all the people who helped make a wedding that
day.

By three o'clock, however, everything was about done and there were
only the final touches to be put on. Grandma engineered everything
over the telephone and Green Valley responded whole-heartedly, as it
always did to all her work.

Fanny Foster had found time to run down to Jessup's and buy the bride a
first-class tablecloth and some towels. Fanny was always buying the
most appropriate, tasty and serviceable things for other people and the
most outlandish, cheap and second-hand stuff for herself. The
tablecloth was extravagantly good, as Grandma sternly told her.

But, "La--what of it! I was saving the money to buy myself a silk
petticoat," Fanny defended herself. "I wanted to know just once before
I died what and how it felt like to rustle up the church aisle instead
of slinking down it on a Sunday morning. But I just think a silk
petticoat isn't worth thinking about when a thing like this happens."

So Grandma smiled and as she laid out her best black silk she made a
mental note of the fact that Fanny Foster was to have, sometime or
other, a silk petticoat, made up to her for this day's work and
self-sacrifice. For Grandma was one of those rare practical people who
yet believed in respecting the foolish dreams of impractical humans.

So it came about that everybody who could walk was at Tommy's and
Alice's wedding. The bride wore a beautifully simple dress that came
from Paris in Nan's trunk. And there were roses in her hair and Tommy
hardly knew her, and her father and mother certainly did not, so dazed
were they.

The little doll house was already a home, with all of Green Valley
trooping in to leave little gifts and stopping long enough to shake
Tommy's hand and wish him luck and health and maybe twins.

Indeed, Alice Sears' elopement and wedding became a part of Green
Valley history, so great an event was it, what with the suddenness of
it and the whole town being asked and Nan Ainslee coming home so
providentially, and Cynthia's son making a speech.

The crowd was so great and so merry that the little Brownlee girl,
having tucked her fretful mother up in bed, stole out to the garden
fence and watched the doings w