They say I did it. Say I'm responsible for every bit of it, and that I will have to look after them all the rest of their lives to see that I didn't make a mistake in writing that letter. And that I'm to go to Europe with them on their wedding tour and live with them always and always. And--oh!--I believe my heart is going to burst with miserable happiness and happy miserableness, and my head feels like it's in a bag.

Dr. Parke Alden and Miss Katherine Trent are the two nicest people on earth, and the two I love best. But I don't think they know all the time what they are doing and saying. They are that in love they don't see but one side--the happy side--and they think I am going to leave this place with a skip and a jump and run along by them, third person, single number, and not know I'm in the way.

They won't even listen when I tell them I don't know what I'm going to do. I know what I want to do! Everything in me gets into shivering trembleness when I think I could go to Europe with them on their wedding trip. Think of it! Mary Cary could go to E-U-R-O-P-E!

They've invited me and say I'm to go, because I'm never to leave them any more, and they want me. But it isn't so. Mary tries to believe it's so, but Martha knows it isn't. They think they think they want me, but they don't; n.o.body wants an outsider on a wedding tour, and I'm not going. I can't help it. Come on, tears! Even angels sometimes cry aloud; and, not being a step-relation to one, I'm going to let Mary cry if she wants to. Sometimes Martha is real hard on Mary.

There is no use studying Human Nature. You can't study a thing that changes by day and by night, and is so uncertain you never know what it is going to do. Now, here is Mary Cary, mostly Martha, who would rather get on a train or a boat and go somewhere--she don't care where--than to do any other thing on earth. Who has never seen anything and wants to see everything, and who, if anyone had told her a year ago she could go to New York, and then to Europe, would have slid down every flight of stairs head foremost from pure joy. And now she has the chance, she is not going. She is Not.

She hasn't much sense, Mary Cary hasn't, but enough to know wedding trips are personal, and, besides, the girls have turned into regular weepers. Every time anything is said about going away their eyes water up, and Martha feels like a yellow dog with no tail. I know they hate Miss Katherine's going; but why do they cry about my going? Lord, this is a strange place to live in, this world is! I wonder what heaven will be like?

Miss Bray is much better. She says Uncle Parke has cured her. I don't believe it. I believe it was Relief of the Mind.

I wasn't meant to be a sad person. I was silly sad the other day; but I've found out when anything bothers you very much, it helps to take it out and look at it. Walk all around it, poke it and see if it's sure enough, and, if it isn't, tell it you'll see it dead before you'll let it do you that way.

That's what I did with what was making me doleful, and now I'm all right again. It was because I did want to go to Europe awful, and it twisted my heart like a machine had it when I turned my back on the chance. And then, too, it was because the girls begged me so not to go away for good that I got so worried.

They said it wouldn't be the same if I wasn't here, and though they didn't blame me, they begged me so not to go that I got as addled as the old black hen that hatched ducks.

Now, did you ever hear of such a thing? As if it really mattered where Mary Cary lived! I didn't know anybody truly cared, and finding out made me light in the head. But I know that's just pa.s.sing--their caring, I mean. I'm much obliged; but they'll forget it in a little while, and I will be just a memory.

I hope it will be bright. There's so much dark you can't help that a brightness is real enjoyable. They say what you look for you see, and what you want to forget you mustn't remember. There are a lot of things about my Orphan life I'm going to try to forget. But there are some that for the sake of sense, and in case of airs, I had better bear in mind. I guess Martha will see to those. Whenever Mary gives signs of soaring, Martha brings her straight back to earth. Martha doesn't care for soarers, and she has a terrible bad habit of letting them know she don't.

Yorkburg hasn't settled down yet, and is still hanging on to the last remnants of the surprise about Uncle Parke's coming, and about his marriage to Miss Katherine and my going away.

Of course, Miss Amelia c.o.keland wanted to know if he'd made the Asylum a present, and how much. At first n.o.body would tell her. She's got such a ripping curiosity that there isn't a sneeze sneezed in Yorkburg, or a cake baked, or a door shut that she doesn't want to know why. But maybe she can't help it. Some people are natural inquirers, and that's the way she makes her living, telling the news.

She used to work b.u.t.tonholes, but since she can't see good she just spends the day out and tells all she hears. n.o.body really likes her, but her tongue is too sharp to fool with. To keep from being talked about, everybody pretends to be friendly.

I don't. She shook her finger at me once because I wouldn't tell her what was in Miss Katherine's letter the first time she went away, and since then she's never noticed me until Uncle Parke came. Now every time I see her she's awful pleasant, and tries to make me talk. But a finger once shook is shook. I don't talk.

But Uncle Parke did make the Asylum a present. He didn't tell me, neither did Miss Katherine, and I don't think he wanted anybody but the Board ladies to know. But, of course, they couldn't keep it secret. They told their husbands, and that meant the town. Nothing but a dead man could keep from talking about money.

It must have been a lot he gave, for Peelie Duke told me she heard Mrs.

Carr and Mrs. Dent talking about it the day she took some apple-jelly for Miss Jones over to little Jessie Carr, who was sick.

"He could have kept her at a fashionable boarding-school from the day she was born until now for the sum he's turned over to the Board," said Mrs. Carr, and her eyes, which are the beaming kind, just danced, Peelie said.

"Well, he ought to," grunted Mrs. Dent, who talks like her tongue was down her throat. "He ought to! We've been taking care of the child for almost ten years. I hear he wants the house put in good condition, a new dining-room and kitchen built and four bath-rooms. The rest is to go to the endowment. I think more ought to go to the endowment and less for these luxuries. I don't approve of them. An Orphan Asylum is not a hotel."

"No, but it ought to be a home, if possible," said Mrs. Carr, and Peelie said she looked at Mrs. Dent like she wondered how under heaven her husband stood her all the time.

I certainly am glad to know I'm paid for. Some day, when I'm grown and earning my own living, before I marry my children's father, I am going to give as much as I can of that money back to Uncle Parke. Of course that will be some time off, and until then I'll just have to try to be a nice person.

Miss Katherine says a whole lot of people would pay a big price to have a nice person in the house with them--one of those cheerful, sunshiny kind that helps and is encouraging, and gets up again when they fall down. As I can't earn money yet, I'm going to try to be something like that, so they won't be sorry I ever was born. Uncle Parke and Miss Katherine won't.

But isn't it strange, when the time comes for you to do a thing you are crazy to do, you wish it hadn't come?

There have been days when I hated this Asylum. I've felt at times that I was just one of the numbers of the multiplication table, and in all my life I'd never be anything else. And I'd almost sweep the bricks up out of the yard, I'd be so mad to think I was nothing and n.o.body.

I wanted to be something and somebody. I didn't want to die and be forgotten. I would have liked to sit on St. John's Church steeple and have everybody look at me and say:

"That's Mary Cary! She's great and rich, and gives away lots of money and sings like an angel." That's what I once would have liked, but I've learned a few things since I didn't know then.

One is that high places are lonely and hard and uncomfortable, and people who have sat on them have sometimes wished they didn't. Miss Katherine told me that herself, also that the place you're in is pretty near what you're fitted to fill. Otherwise you'd get out and fill another.

I've given up steeples and superiorities. But I'm glad I'm not going to be an orphan, just an orphan, all my life. I'm glad; still, when I think of going away and leaving everybody and everything: the old pump, where I drowned my first little chicken washing it; and the old mulberry-tree, where my first doll was buried; and the garret, where I made up ghost-stories for the girls on rainy days; and the school-room; and even No. 4--when I think of these things, I could be like that man in the Bible (I believe it was David, but it might have been Jonah), I could lift up my voice and weep.

But I'm not going to. Weepers are a nuisance.

I guess that's the way with life, though. When things are going, you try to hold them back. And if you got them, you'd maybe wish you hadn't.

That's the way Mrs. Gaines did when her husband died. I mean when he didn't die that first time. She thought he was going to, and so did everybody else. He had Fright's disease, and it affected his heart, being liable to take him off any time, and Mrs. Gaines just carried on terrible.

She had faintings and hysterics, and said she couldn't live without him, though everybody in Yorkburg knew she could, and easy enough. He without her, too, had she gone first. She had asthma and an outbreaking temper, and he drank.

Mrs. Mosby--she's the doctor's wife--said she didn't blame him. No man could stand Mrs. Gaines all the time without something to help, and everybody hoped when he got so ill that he'd die and have a little rest.

But he didn't. He got better.

Mrs. Gaines was so surprised she was downright disagreeable about it, and how he stood it was a wonder. He 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 being a doctor, and that he doesn't have to work. "But a man who doesn't work hasn't any excuse for living," I heard him tell somebody, and maybe it's so, though I don't know.