Fortunately Kate’s marriage came to distract them for a while from the thought of Bud’s future. The essential house had been found that was suitable for a captain, yet not too dearly rented,—a piece of luck in a community where dwellings are rarely vacant, and every tenant over eighty years of age has the uneasy consciousness that half a dozen pairs betrothed have already decided upon a different colour of paint for his windows, and have become resigned, with a not unpleasing melancholy, to the thought that in the course of nature his time cannot be long.

The Captain—that once roving eagle-heart subdued by love for the maid of Colonsay—so persistently discouraged any yachting trips which took the Wave for more than a night or two from her moorings, that Lady Anne and her husband, knowing the heart themselves, recommended immediate marriage; and Miss Bell, in consequence, was scouring the countryside for Kate’s successor in the kitchen, but hopeless of coming on one who could cook good kail, have a cheery face, and be a strict communicant. “I can get fine cooks that are wanting in the grace of God, and pious girls who couldn’t be trusted to bake a Christian scone,” she said; “it’s a choice between two evils.”

“Of two evils choose the third, then,” said Dan to his sister, flushed and exhilarated by a search that, for elderly maiden ladies, makes up for an older hunt. “The sport’s agreeing with you.”

It was a great distress to Bud that the wedding should take place in the house and not in church, as seemed most fitting. She felt a private ceremony deprived her of a spectacle, with Miss Amelia Duff playing the wedding march on the harmonium, and the audience filing up the aisle in their Sunday clothes, the carriage of their hats revealing character.

“Why, you’re simply going to make it look like a plain tea!” she protested. “If it was my marriage, Kate, I’d have it as solemn and grand as Harvest Sunday. A body doesn’t get married to a man in brass buttons every other day, and it’s a chance for style.”

“We never have our weddings in the church,” said Kate. “Sometimes the gentry do, but it’s not considered nice; it’s kind of Roman Catholic. Forbye, in a church, where would you get the fun?”

If Bud hadn’t realised that fun was the main thing at Scottish weddings, she got hints of it in Kate’s preparation. Croodles and hysterics took possession of the bride: she was sure she would never get through the ceremony with her life, or she would certainly do something silly that would make the whole world laugh at her and dreadfully vex the Captain. Even her wedding-dress, whose prospect had filled her dreams with gladness, but deepened her depression when it came from the manteau-makers: she wept sad stains on the front width, and the orange-blossom they rehearsed with might have been a wreath of the bitter rue. Bud wanted her to try the dress on, but the bride was aghast at such an unlucky proposition; so she tried it on herself, with sweet results, if one did not look at the gathers in the back. They practised the ceremony the night before, Kate’s sister from Colonsay (who was to be her bridesmaid) playing the part of a tall, brass-buttoned bridegroom.

“Oh, Kate!” cried Bud pitifully, “you stand there like’s you were a soda-water bottle and the cork lost. My goodness! brisk up a bit. If it’s hard on you, just remember it isn’t much of a joke for Charles. Don’t you know the eyes a the public are on you?”“That’s just it,” said poor Kate. “I wouldn’t be frightened a bit if it wasn’t for that, for I’m so brave. What do you do with your hands?”

“You just keep hold of them. Mercy! don’t let them hang like that,—they’re yours; up till now he’s got nothing to do with them. Now for the tears—where’s your handkerchief? That one’s yards too big, and there isn’t an edge of lace to peek through, but it’ll do this time. It’ll all be right on the night. Now the minister’s speaking, and you’re looking down at the carpet and you’re timid and fluttered and nervous and thinking what an epoch this is in your sinful life, and how you won’t be Kate MacNeill any more but Mrs Charles Maclean, and the Lord knows if you will be happy with him—”

The bride blubbered and threw her apron over her head as usual: Bud was in despair.

“Well, you are a silly!” she exclaimed. “All you want is a gentle tear or two trickling down the side of your nose, enough to make your eyes blink but not enough to soak your veil or leave streaks. And there you gush like a waterspout, and damp your face so much the bridegroom’ll catch his death of cold when he kisses you! Stop it, Kate MacNeill,—it isn’t anybody’s funeral: why, weddings aren’t so very fatal; lots of folk get over them—leastways in America.”

“I can’t help it!” protested the weeping maid. “I never could be melancholy in moderation, and the way you speak you make me think it’s running a dreadful risk to marry anybody.”

“Well,” said Bud, “you needn’t think of things so harrowing, I suppose. Just squeeze your eyes together and bite your lip, and perhaps it’ll start a tear: if it don’t, it’ll look like as if you were bravely struggling with emotion. And then there’s the proud glad smile as you back out on Charles’s arm—give her your arm, Minnie,—the trial’s over, you know, and you’ve got on a lovely new plain ring, and all the other girls are envious, and Charles Maclean and you are one till death do you part. Oh, Kate, Kate! don’t grin; that’s not a smile, it’s a—it’s a railroad track. Look—” Bud assumed a smile that spoke of gladness and humility, confidence and a maiden’s fears,—a smile that appealed and charmed.

“I couldn’t smile like that to save my life,” said Kate in a despair. “I wish you had learned me that instead of the height of Popacatthekettle. Do you think he’ll be angry if I don’t do them things properly?”

“Who? Charles! Why, Charles’ll be so mortally scared himself he wouldn’t notice if you made faces at him, or were a different girl altogether. He’ll have a dull dead booming in his ears, and wonder whether it’s wedding-day or apple-custard: all of them I’ve seen married looked like that. It’s not for Charles you should weep and smile; it’s for the front of the house, you know,—it’s for the people looking on.”

“Toots!” said Kate, relieved. “If it’s only for them, I needn’t bother. I thought that maybe it was something truly refined that he would be expecting. It’s not—it’s not the front of a house I’m marrying. Tell me this and tell me no more—is there anything special I should do to please my Charles?”

“I don’t think I’d worry,” said Bud on reflection. “I daresay it’s better not to think of anything dramatic. If I were you I’d just keep calm as grass, and pray the Lord to give me a good contented mind and hurry up the clergyman.”

But yet was the maiden full of a consciousness of imperfection, since she had seen that day the bride’s-cake on view in the baker’s window,—an edifice of art so splendid that she felt she could never be worthy of it. “How do you think I’ll look?” she asked. And Bud assured her she would look magnificently lovely.

“Oh, I wish I did,” she sighed. “But I’m feared I’ll not look so lovely as I think I do.”

“No girl ever did,” said Bud. “That’s impossible; but when Charles comes to and sits up he’ll think you’re It: he’ll think you perfect.”

“Indeed I’m far from that,” said Kate. “I have just my health and napery and a liking for the chap, and I wish I wasn’t near so red.”

Bud was able to instruct her in the right deportment for a bride, but had no experience in the management of husbands: for that Kate had to take some hints from her mistress, who was under the delusion that her brother Dan was the standard of his sex.

“They’re curious creatures,” Bell confided. “You must have patience, ay, and humour them. They’ll trot at your heels like pussy for a cheese-pudding, but they’ll not be driven. If I had a man I would never thwart him. If he was out of temper or unreasonable I would tell him he was looking ill, and that would make him feared and humble. When a man thinks he’s ill, his trust must be in the Lord and in his woman-kind. That’s where we have the upper hand of them! First and last, the thing’s to be agreeable. You’ll find he’ll never put anything in its proper place, and that’s a heartbreak, but it’s not so bad as if he broke the dishes and blackened your eyes, the way they do in the newspapers. There’s one thing that’s the secret of a happy home—to live in the fear of God and within your income, faith! you can’t live very well without it.”

“Oh, mem! it’s a desperate thing a wedding,” said the maid. “I never, in all my life, had so much to think about before.”

There were stricken lads in these days! The more imminent became her utter loss, the more desirable Kate became. But sentiment in country towns is an accommodating thing, and all the old suitors—the whistlers in the close and purveyors of conversation lozenges—found consolation in the fun at the wedding, and danced their griefs away on the flags of the Dyces’ kitchen.

A noble wedding! All the cookery skill of Kate and her mistress was expended on it, and discretion, for the sake of the incredulous, forbids enumeration of the roasted hens. Chanticleers in the town crowed roupily and ruefully for months thereafter. The bridegroom might have stepped over the wall to the wedding chamber, or walked to it in a hundred paces up the lane: he rode instead in a carriage that made a stately and circuitous approach round John Turner’s Corner, and wished the distance had been twenty times as long. “It’s not that I’m feared,” said he, “or that I’ve rued the gyurl, but—but it’s kind of sudden!”—a curious estimate of a courtship that had started in the burial-ground of Colonsay so many years before!

A noble wedding—its revelry kept the town awake till morning. From the open windows the night was filled with dancing tunes, and songs, and laughter; boys cried “Fab, fab!” in the street, and a fairy lady—really a lady all grown up, alas!—stood at a window and showered pence among them.

Long before the wedding-party ended, Bud went up to bed, but she lay for hours awake in the camceil room hearing the revelry of the kitchen. She had said good-bye to the blissful pair whose wedding was the consequence of her own daft pranks as letter-writer: she would miss the maid of Colonsay. The knowledge that ’tis an uncertain world, a place of change and partings, comes to us all sooner or later in one flash of apprehension and of grief: for the first time Bud felt the irrevocable nature of the past, and that her happy world under this roof was, someway, crumbling, and the tears came to her eyes.

A hurried footstep sounded on the stairs, a rap came to her door, and the bride came in, unbid, in the darkness, whispering Lennox’s name.

Her only answer was a sob from the girl in bed.

“Miss Lennox!” said the bride distressed; “what ails you? I’ve come up to say good-bye: it wasn’t a right good-bye at all with yon folk looking. Oh, Lennox, Lennox! ghaol mo chridhe! my heart is sore to be leaving you, for the two of us were so merry! Now I have a man, and a good man too; it was you that gave me him, but I have lost my loving friend.” She threw herself on the bed, regardless of her finery, and the Celtic fount of her swelled over in sobs and tears.