while he limped beside her on his rheumatic old legs.

Instead of stopping with the others for the wedding feast at the
Solomon's cottage, Sarah pleaded a sudden palpitation of the heart, and
hurried home to put the house in order before the arrival of the bride.
Already she had prepared the best chamber and set the supper table with
her blue and white china, but as she walked quietly home from church
at the side of old Adam, she had remembered, with a sensation of panic,
that she had forgotten to make up the the feather bed, which she
rolled over for an airing. Not a speck of dust was left on the floor
or windows, and a little later, while she began spreading the sheets,
without waiting to remove her bonnet, she thought proudly that Judy
probably never stayed in so entirely respectable a chamber in her life.
Even the pitcher and basin were elaborately ornamented with peonies,
the colour of the sampler in crewel work over the washstand; and on the
bureau, between two crocheted mats of an intricate pattern, there was a
pincushion in the shape of a monstrous tomato.

Yes, it was all ready for them, she reflected, while she stood in the
doorway and surveyed the results of her handiwork. "Thar's something
wantin'," she observed presently to herself. "I never could feel that
a weddin' or a funeral was finished without a calla lily somewhere
around." Going downstairs to the kitchen, she clipped the last forced
blossoms of an unusual size from her "prize" plant, and brought them
back in a small glass vase to decorate Judy's bureau. "Now it's just
like it was when I was married," she thought, "an' it's just as it
will be when Abel's sons are bringin' home their brides." There was no
sentiment in her thoughts, for she regarded sentiment as a mere morbid
stimulant to the kind of emotion she considered both dangerous and
useless. Even the look on Abel's face, which she had been forced to
recognize as that of despair, seemed to her, on the whole, a safer
expression than one of a too-exultant joy. She was not afraid of
despair--its manifestations were familiar to her, and she had usually
found them amenable to the laws of propriety. But she felt vaguely that
happiness in some mysterious way was related to sin, and the shameless
ecstasy with which Abel had announced his engagement to Molly had
branded his emotion as positively immoral in her sight. "No decent
feelin' is goin' to make anybody's face shine like a brass plate," she
had