n him for two
years. Say, Martha, there was an English painter in Millford when we
lived there who sent home for his girl, and comin' over on the boat
didn't she meet another fellow she liked better and she up and
married him. Wouldn't it be awful if Thursa was to do that after
Arthur gettin' all ready, too?"

Martha did not answer, and Pearl, looking up, was startled at the
expression of her face--it was like the face of a shipwrecked sailor
who has been looking, looking, looking over a desolate waste of
water, dreaming of hope, but never daring to hope, when suddenly,
before his weary eyes, there flashes a sail! Of course, it may not be
a sail at all, and even if it is a boat it may never, never see the
shipwrecked sailor, but still a great hope leaps into his face!

Pearl saw it all in Martha's face in that moment; she remembered
Martha's saying that often when she sat at her embroidery she
imagined foolish things that could never come true.

"Isn't she a brick?" Pearl thought to herself. "Gettin' ready for
this weddin' just as cheerful as if her heart wasn't breakin'!" Then
Pearl, in her quick imagination, made a new application: "Just like
if it was me gettin' ready for Miss Morrison to marry--" She stopped
and thought, with a stern look on her face. Then she said to herself
grimly: "I believe this is the greatest piece of True Greatness I've
seen yet, and if it is, then I haven't got a smell of it."

"No word from Bud, is there, Martha?" asked after a while.

"Nothing, only the card from Calgary saying he was working on a
horse-ranch west of there. It's lonely without him, I tell you,
Pearl. I wonder will he ever come back?" said Martha wistfully.

"Sure he will!" cried Pearl. "Bud'll come back, and it'll all be
cleared up, and don't you forget it."

"I don't know how, Pearl."

"Some way we don't expect, maybe, but it'll all come right.
Everything will in time," Pearl answered cheerfully.

At tea-time the conversation naturally turned to weddings. Mr.
Perkins had been in a doleful frame of mind until the visitors came,
but under the stimulus of fresh listeners he brightened up
wonderfully. Here were two people who had not heard any of his
stories. He was full of reminiscences of strange weddings that he had
been at or had heard of. One in particular, which came back to him
now with great vividness, was when his friend, Ned Mullins, married
the Spain girl down "the Ot'way."

"Ned had intended to marry