t I whispered that I would
see Taylor on my way to Rose Hill, and at ten
o'clock the next morning we would meet her at
the back of Miss Susanna's vegetable garden
under the big locust-tree, and that she mustn't
worry, we'd fix it, he and I. Also I told her she
might bring up some toilet things and little
traveling necessities and leave them with me;
and though she clung to me like a frightened
child and didn't speak, she was down by the
barn the next morning at ten, and so was Taylor.
I let them get there a little ahead of me.

CHAPTER XXVI

They are married and gone, and for two days Twickenham Town has talked
of nothing else. It made a regular soup of the marriage. The bride
and groom were the stock, the grandparent and maiden aunts were the
thickening, and I was the seasoning; but all that does not matter now.
The ancestralized person has learned that the twentieth century sees
some things clearer than the eighteenth did, but she will never admit
that she has learned it. Taylor and Amy were not unmindful of what was
due her, however. Taylor wrote her a very nice letter, asking her
permission to marry her granddaughter and take her to South America,
and her answer was low-down. He wrote as a gentleman should, and she
answered as a lady shouldn't, for her answer was insulting, and a real
lady never humiliates any one. After reading it Taylor told Amy to
meet him at seven o'clock on Wednesday morning, and they would be
married in the church with no one present but his brother (the only
relative Taylor has in town is a bachelor brother), and the sexton, the
minister, and me. She met and the marriage took place.

We didn't tell a soul about the marriage. The night before Amy spent
with me at Rose Hill, and, thinking it best Taylor should not be there,
I told him not to come, and sent the other boys home early. In my room
I packed my suitcase and put in it two dresses I had never worn, which
I was glad to do, as it would mean that much less to pack when I went
home, and also I put in some other things; and though Amy cried a good
deal and didn't think she ought to take them, she was very particular
about how they went in. She is very neat and careful, and I'm
fearfully quick, so it was well she watched me. I told her she was
doing me a favor to dispossess me of what I didn't want and what was in
my way, and as we were the same height, though Amy is a little thinner,
owing to secret love and distress