Molly Brown's Post-Graduate Days. Speed Nell

three or four cheese scoops and several butter knives and a card tray or two? A young couple could easily make out for a while with one of each, and if he will promise to go back to Indiana and stay – You did come from Indiana, didn’t you?” The man gave a grin and nodded. “Well, if you promise to go back and never put your foot in Kentucky again, I’ll go wrap up Aunt Clay’s vases for you.”

      Mrs. Brown, thankful that her brood was safe and no more damage done the poor, wicked tramp than a sore shoulder, a swollen nose and a fractured jaw, sent them all to bed with instructions to sleep late, and told Molly and Judy to stay in bed for breakfast. The burglar was put in the smokehouse for safekeeping until sun-up, when John and Paul expected to take him to Louisville, swear out a warrant against him and land him in jail. When the time came, however, to transfer their prisoner from smokehouse to jail, they found the door open, the man gone and a fine old ham missing.

      “An’ they ain’t a single pusson in the whole er Indianny what knows how ter cook a ham, either,” bewailed Aunt Mary.

      “To think the ungrateful wretch went off without Aunt Clay’s vases,” muttered Crittenden Rutledge.

      CHAPTER V. – THE WEDDING

      The wedding came off so exactly as Judy had planned it that it seemed to her to be a proof of the theory of transmigration of the soul, and that in a previous incarnation she had been to just such a wedding. The eldest brother, Ernest, arrived from the far West just in time to change his clothes and give the bride away. There were three understudies for his part, so there was not much concern over his non-arrival until he got there with a blood-curdling tale of wrecks and wash-outs that had delayed him twenty-four hours. Then all of them got very much concerned and Mrs. Brown reproached herself for being so taken up with Mildred’s wedding that she had forgotten to worry about the absent one for the time being. Ernest resembled Sue more than any of the rest of them, and had a good deal of her poise and dignity. “But I’ll wager that he is not as serious as he seems,” thought Judy, detecting a twinkle in the corner of his sober eyes.

      Mildred looked lovely, and she had such a sweet, trusting look in her eyes as she came down the steps and up the tan-bark walk on Ernest’s arm, that Crittenden Rutledge, waiting for her at the end of the walk, broke away from his best man and went forward several yards to meet his bride. Sue and Molly brought up the rear; Sue, composed and calm with her sweet dignity; but Molly, so deeply moved by this beloved sister’s marriage and the break in their ranks, the very first, that she felt her knees trembling and wondered if it could be possible that she was going to ruin everything and burst into tears or fall in a faint or do something terrible. But she didn’t. The familiar voice of their old minister in the opening lines of the Episcopal marriage service brought her to her senses, and she was able to follow the ritual in her mind, but she dared not trust herself to look up. She kept her eyes glued to her bouquet of “love-in-the-mist,” that Miss Lizzie Monday had brought her that morning, picked from her own old-fashioned garden.

      “I know the groom will send the bridesmaids flowers, but somehow, Molly, I don’t want you to carry hothouse flowers. These ‘love-in-the-mists’ will look just right with your dress and your eyes and your ways.”

      So Molly carried Miss Lizzie’s “bokay” and put the flowers that the groom sent her in a vase in the parlor. But Molly was not thinking of her dress or her eyes, except to try to keep the tears in them, since come they would, and not let them run out on her cheeks. Mildred’s responses were inaudible except to dear old Dr. Peters, the minister, but Crittenden’s were so loud and clear and resonant that it was almost like chanting, and Judy had to smile when she could not help thinking of the stammering man’s “Your house is on fire, tra la, tra la.”

      “I pronounce you man and wife.”

      All is over. Molly can let the tears fall now if she wants to, but, strange to say, she does not seem to want to any more. Such a rejoicing is going on. Everybody seems to be kissing everybody else. Aren’t they all more or less kin? Mildred and Kent, the center of a gay crowd, are fondly kissing the ones they should merely shake hands with, and formally shaking hands with their nearest and dearest, just as in a fire people have been known to carry carefully the pillows downstairs and throw the bowls and pitchers out of the window. Kent has his wits about him, however, and kisses Judy, declaring it is all in the day’s work.

      A stranger standing on the outskirts of the crowd during the whole ceremony seemed much more interested in the bridesmaid dressed in blue than in the bride herself, and when this same bridesmaid felt herself swaying a little as though her emotion might get the better of her, if one had not been so taken up with the central figures on the stage he might have noticed the stranger start forward as though to go to her assistance. But he, too, was brought to his senses by the calm voice of Dr. Peters in the opening words of the service, and saw with evident relief that the bridesmaid had gained control of herself. He was a tall young man with kind brown eyes and light hair, a little thin at the temples, giving him more years perhaps than he was entitled to.

      When the service was over and the general confusion ensued, he made his way swiftly to where Molly stood, and without saying one word of greeting he put his arm around her and tenderly kissed her. Molly was so overcome with astonishment that she could only gasp, “Professor Green! What are you doing here?”

      “I am having a very pleasant time, thank you, Miss Molly. I got your mother’s kind invitation to attend your sister’s wedding, and – here I am. Didn’t your brother Paul tell you that I had come?”

      “No, we have been so occupied, I believe I have not seen Paul to-day.”

      “I went to his newspaper office in Louisville to find out something about how to get here, and he asked me to drive out with him. Are you sorry I came, Miss Molly?”

      “Sorry? Oh, Professor Green, you must know how glad I am to see you! But, you see, I was a little startled, not expecting you and thinking of you as still at Wellington.”

      “If you were thinking of me as being anywhere at all, I feel better. Were you really thinking of me?”

      “Yes,” said the candid Molly, “and wasn’t it strange that I was thinking of you just as you came up – and – and – ” but, remembering his manner of greeting her, she blushed painfully.

      “You are not angry with me, are you, my dear child? I felt so lonesome. You see everybody seemed to know everybody else, and there was such a handshaking and so forth going on that before I knew it I was in the swim.”

      “Almost every one here is kin or near-kin, and weddings in Kentucky seem to give a great deal of license,” said Molly, recovering her equanimity. “Of course I am not angry with you. I could not get angry with any one on Mildred’s wedding day.”

      But Molly felt that in a way Edwin Green had paid her back for the hug she had given him. She had hugged him because he was so old that she could do so with impunity, and he in turn had kissed her because he felt lonesome, forsooth, and she was so young that it made no great difference. His “My dear child” had been a kind of humiliation to Molly. What is the use of being a senior and graduating at college if a man very little over thirty thinks you are nothing but a kid?

      “Professor Green is not so very much older than Ernest,” thought Molly, “and I wager he will not treat Judy with that old-enough-to-be-your-father air! Here am I getting mad on Mildred’s wedding day when I just said I could not! And, after all, Professor Green has been very kind to me and means to be now, I know.” Turning to him with one of “Molly’s own,” as Edith Williams termed her smile, she said, “Now you must meet my mother and all the rest of them.”

      Mrs. Brown looked keenly and rather sadly at the young professor. This coming of men for her daughters was growing wearisome, so the poor lady thought; but she liked Edwin Green’s expression and found herself trusting him before he got through explaining his sudden appearance in Kentucky.

      “After all, maybe he is only thinking of Molly as one of his pupils. His buying the orchard meant an interest in her college course and nothing else.”

      Mrs. Brown introduced him to the relatives and friends near her, and Molly had to leave him and make herself useful,