all possible
difficulty as to the future of his house and estate; but the fourth
volcanic storm had once more sent the world flying in pieces about
Mrs. Baxter's delicate ears; and, during the last three months she had
had to face the prospect of Laurie's bringing home as a bride the
rather underbred, pretty, stammering, pink and white daughter of a
Baptist grocer of the village.

This had been a terrible affair altogether; Laurie, as is the custom
of a certain kind of young male, had met, spoken to, and ultimately
kissed this Amy Nugent, on a certain summer evening as the stars came
out; but, with a chivalry not so common in such cases, had also
sincerely and simply fallen in love with her, with a romance usually
reserved for better-matched affections. It seemed, from Laurie's
conversation, that Amy was possessed of every grace of body, mind, and
soul required in one who was to be mistress of the great house; it was
not, so Laurie explained, at all a milkmaid kind of affair; he was not
the man, he said, to make a fool of himself over a pretty face. No,
Amy was a rare soul, a flower growing on stony soil--sandy perhaps
would be the better word--and it was his deliberate intention to make
her his wife.

Then had followed every argument known to mothers, for it was not
likely that even Mrs. Baxter would accept without a struggle a
daughter-in-law who, five years before, had bobbed to her, wearing a
pinafore, and carrying in a pair of rather large hands a basket of
eggs to her back door. Then she had consented to see the girl, and the
interview in the garden had left her more distressed than ever. (It
was there that the aitch incident had taken place.) And so the
struggle had gone on; Laurie had protested, stormed, sulked, taken
refuge in rhetoric and dignity alternately; and his mother had with
gentle persistence objected, held her peace, argued, and resisted,
conflicting step by step against the inevitable, seeking to reconcile
her son by pathos and her God by petition; and then in an instant,
only four days ago, it seemed that the latter had prevailed; and today
Laurie, in a black suit, rent by sorrow, at this very hour at which
the two ladies sat and talked in the drawing-room, was standing by an
open grave in the village churchyard, seeing the last of his love,
under a pile of blossoms as pink and white as her own complexion,
within four elm-boards with a brass plate upon the cover.

Now, therefore, there was a ne